Darwin and the humanities

CD

CO

Library of

Genetic Science

and

Philosophy

Vol. 11

*

DARWIN AND THE
HUMANITIES

OTHER WORKS

by

JAMES MARK BALDWIN

Ph.D. (Princeton), Hon. D.Sc. (Oxford, Geneva), LL.D. (Glasgow, South Caro
lina). Vice-President (1910) Institut International de Sociologie. Presi
dent (1909-13) International Congress of Psychology. Member Aris
totelian and Sociological Societies of London, &c. Laureate
Royal Danish Academy of Sciences. Lately Professor in
Princeton University and in the Johns Hopkins
University. Editor of the Psychological Review.

HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOLOGY. 2 Vols. Holt & Co., New

York.
ELEMENTS OF PSYCHOLOGY. Same Publishers. Translated

into Spanish.
MENTAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE CHILD AND THE RACE.

3d ed. New York and London, Macmillan. Translated

into French and German.
SOCIAL AND ETHICAL INTERPRETATIONS. 4th ed. Same

publishers. Translated into French, German and Spanish.
DEVELOPMENT AND EVOLUTION. Same publishers.
DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY. 3 vols. in

4 parts. Same publishers.
STORY OF THE MIND. (Popular). New York, Appleton;

London, Newnes; also Hodder& Stoughton ('The Mind").

Translated into Italian and Spanish.
FRAGMENTS IN PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE. Collected Essays.

New York, Scribner; London, Nimmo.
THOUGHT AND THINGS, OR GENETIC LOGIC. Vols. I and II

(vol. Ill in preparation). London, Sonnenschein; New

York, Macmillan. In course of translation into French,

German and Spanish.

PSYCHOLOGICAL REVIEW PUBLICATIONS

LIBRART OF GENETIC SCIENCE AND
PHILOSOPHY. VOL. II

DARWIN AND THE
HUMANITIES

BY
JAMES MARK BALDWIN

REVIEW PUBLISHING CO.

BALTIMORE

1909

COPYRIGHT, 1909,

BY THE
REVIEW PUBLISHING CO.

All rights reserved.

PRINTED BY

WILLIAMS fc WILK1NS COMPANY
BALTIMORE

To

ALFRED RUSSEL WALLACE

whose Interest, like that

of his co-worker Dar-

ivin, extends to all

the Humanities

PREFACE

This booklet had its origin in a paper on ' The Influence of
Darwin on the Mental and Moral Sciences/ prepared by
request for the Darwin Celebration of the American Philosoph
ical Society, April 23, 1909. The paper was not presented
at the meeting on account of my necessary absence from
the country. Being greatly interested in the subject, how
ever, I revised the manuscript on a larger scale, still adhering
strictly to the original topic, with the result here set down.
The book is still no more than an outline or sketch; butl have
endeavored to make the successive points plain; and
possibly the whole may be found clearer and more effective
from its brief and succinct mode of presentation.

The subject is very attractive; its treatment should also
prove useful. The numerous celebrations which the double
anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the publication of
the Origin of Species has inspired, have resulted in many
statements of Darwin's influence in the Biological Sciences.1

1 Of recent publications the following are due to the occasion
of this dual anniversary: Fifty Years of Darwinism, by several
authors, papers prepared for the celebration of the Amer. Assn.
for the Adv. of Science, New York, Holt, 1909; Darwinism and
Modern Science, a collection of papers prepared by Cambridge
University, the University Press, 1909; Linnaan Society of
London, Darwin-Wallace Celebration, July i, 1908; Proceedings of
the Celebration of the Amer. Philosoph. Society, April 23, 1909;
The Psychological Review, Darwin Number, devoted to Darwin's
influence on the Humanities, May, 1909, Review Pub. Co., Balti
more, Poulton 'The Centenary of Darwin,' Quarterly Review, July,
1909, and Charles Darwin and the Origin of Species, addresses, etc.,
Longmans, 1909. Less expert readers may be referred to the follow-

VI 11 PREFACE

It is natural that this should be the point of emphasis. Yet
much repetition and some controversy have resulted; while the
corresponding influence of Darwin and the growth of Dar
winism, in the sciences of Mind, the Humanities broadly
defined, have been but scantily traced out and recorded. Nat
uralists are not aware of the extent of it. Personally I find
it necessary as never before, to call myself a 'Darwinian'
simply from having written out in this little volume the
relationships of the several branches of humanistic study,
as I apprehend them, from the point of view of Dar
winism.

Many things seem to be covered from this point of view as
from no other. My favorite doctrines, and those in which my
larger books have been in some measure original, seem now,
when woven together, to have been consciously inspired by the
theory of Natural Selection: I need only mention 'Organic
Selection,' ' Functional Selection,' ' Social Heredity,' ' Selective
: Thinking,' 'Experimental Logic,' thoroughgoing ' Naturalism
of Method,' etc. Such views as these all illustrate or extend
the principle of selection as Darwin conceived it — that is,
the principle of survival from varied cases — as over against
any vitalistic or formal principle. Wherever I have found it

ing works expounding Darwinism in relation to other points of
view, especially in biology: Conn, The Method of Evolution; Headley,
Problems of Evolution; Plate, Selektionsprinzip; Kellogg, Darwinism
Today; Poulton, Essays on Evolution, and Charles Darwin and the
Theory of Natural Selection; Delage, Heredite et les grandes Problemes
de Biologie generale, followed by the annual issues of the Annee
Biologique; Haeckel, General Morphology; Baldwin, Development and
Evolution; Gulick, Evolution, Racial and Habitudinal; Brooks, The
Foundations of Zoology; Metcalf , Organic Evolution. An interesting
historical book is Osborn's From the Greeks to Darwin. For topical
articles, with literary references, by several hands, see the writer's
Diet, of Philosophy. Original works, which have become classical, as
well as more special discussions, are cited in the text.

PREFACE IX

necessary to go beyond the ' Selection' principle, thus denned,
it has been by interpretations, such as that of the theory of
' Genetic Modes/ which do not controvert or deny the univer
sality of this principle, but explicitly recognize and utilize it. I
am not a philosophical Dualist or Positivist; but in the
domain of science I accept both these points of view. And I
further hold that our philosophy must preserve and utilize
the great results of scientific thought without subtracting
one jot or tittle from their full and legitimate force. So,
to make this confession complete — as far as may be without
abusing the liberty allowed in a Preface — I must admit that
the result of my labors for twenty-five years, the net
result, that is, of my scientific work until now, is a contribu
tion, whatever it may turn out to be worth, to the theory of
Darwinism in the sciences of life and mind. I call it a
'confession,' but 'claim' would be a better word; for who
would not consider it an honor to be allowed to ' claim' that
he had done something to carry Darwin's great and illumi
nating conception into those fields of more general philo
sophical interest, in which in the end its value for human
thought must be estimated ? Of course from such a partial
survey as that which is here attempted, one cannot reach
more than a suggestion of what such a final estimate is to be;
but one can anticipate something of the character of
the verdict. I think the conclusion .drawn on page 87 of this
volume, to the effect that natural selection is in principle the
universal law of genetic organization and progress in nature-
human nature no less than physical nature — is that to which
the lines of evidence we now have distinctly point; and while
this still has somewhat the appearance of a forecast, it is one
of those reasonable forecasts which give life and interest to the
progress of science and philosophy alike. If such an antici
pation should lead to renewed investigation looking to the

X PREFACE

testing of the Darwinian theory in still further fields, it would
have its use.

I hope, therefore, that this little book may serve to stim
ulate others, especially students of the further humanities,
Anthropology, Philology, Political Science, Literary Criti
cism,1 etc., to make careful survey of their respective fields
with such an end in view.

I wish to add a word in this place on the relation of Mr.
Alfred Russel Wallace to current Darwinism. The develop
ment of the Darwinian theory has tended to justify certain
of Wallace's original views, rather than those of Darwin;
and notably in just the one point — the exclusion of use-
inheritance — which now serves to define Darwinism as dis
tinguished from other theories, it is Wallace who has led
the way. It may safely be said also, I think that the bril
liant and significant researches made by Wallace subse
quently to the announcement of the theory of natural selec
tion, would practically have established that theory. Accord
ingly, the Darwinian theory of today might with entire
appropriateness be called ' Wallaceism. ' The extraordinary
modesty and high scientific morality of Wallace2 should not
lead his contemporaries to deny to him an equal place with
Darwin in the development of evolution theory; and it
is with this feeling in mind that I dedicate this little book
on 'Darwinism' — entirely without his knowledge — to the
great naturalist, Wallace.

J. MARK BALDWIN.

Paris, September , ipop.

1 As, for example, the very interesting discussions of Prof. J.
P. Hoskins on 'Biological Analogy in Literary Criticism,' in Modern
Philology, April and July, 1909.

2 See the address made by Mr. Wallace at the celebration of the
Linnaean Society, Linn&an Society of London, Darwin-Wallace
Celebration, igo8 (July i).

CONTENTS.

PAGE

PREFACE vii

INTRODUCTORY i

CHAPTER I. Darwinism and Psychology 7

CHAPTER II. Darwinism and the Social Sciences 39

CHAPTER III. Darwinism and Ethics 61

CHAPTER IV. Darwinism and Logic 68

CHAPTER V. Darwinism and Philosophy 78

CHAPTER VI. Darwinism and Religion 88

APPENDIX A. Darwin9 s Judgment 107

APPENDIX B. Darwinism and Logic no

DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

INTRODUCTORY

It should be remembered that the book which we today1
associate especially with the name of Darwin — the book
published just fifty years ago — was followed by another printed
twenty years later. The Origin of Species was followed by
The Descent of Man.2 Darwin the zoologist is Darwin the
humanist as well. He wrote besides a Biographical Sketch of
an Infant.3 It is suggestive that the order or sequence in the
issue of these works holds also of the working out of Darwin's
theory in the two great groups of sciences: the results of
natural selection were fairly well worked out in biology some
years before the influence of the theory became marked in the
mental and moral sciences.

We are today, however, in a position to speak of the influ
ence of Darwin, and of the development of Darwinism, in the
Humanities. Both in general ways, seen especially in the
spirit and method of scientific inquiry, and in specific ways,
seen in the actual use of the theory of selection, this influence
is vital and transforming. Besides the mental and moral
sciences proper, the political and historicial sciences, also, and
the sciences of language and of race — philology, anthropology,

1 This allusion is to the day of the celebration of the publication
of the Origin of Species by the American Philosophical Society of
Philadelphia. See the Preface.

2 First ed., 1871. Quotations in this paper are from the Ameri
can Reprint of the second edition, 1874. I cite also the American
Reprint of the sixth edition of the Origin of Species.

3In Mind, O. S., II, pp. 285ff.

2 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

and ethnology — show it strikingly. It is, however, of the first
of these great divisions of the humanities that I shall speak,
endeavoring to trace this influence in some detail. And
I shall proceed in what may, in a large way, be called the
genetic order: the order, that is, of relative dependence and
complexity, beginning with the branch of knowledge nearest
to Biology and most dependent upon it, namely, Psychology,
then taking up Ethics and Sociology, and finally proceeding
to the more general topics of Logic, Scientific Method,
Philosophy and Religion. Of these provinces it is in Psy
chology and Sociology that the most characteristic results are
to be found; yet in the other fields mentioned the general
change of method and attitude due to Darwin's theory is
so pronounced that it can in no sense be considered less
important.

II

It may no doubt be fairly assumed that the reader knows
in a general way what the theory of Natural Selection, Dar
win's great contribution to science, is and means. Yet there
are certain misunderstandings of the matter that recur so
persistently and die so hard that it may be well to outline briefly
Darwin's actual teaching.

Darwin and Darwinism. The 'Darwinism' of Darwin him
self might be taken to include all that Darwin believed and
taught. This is not good procedure, however. The term
' Darwinism' has come to be applied to the theory of Natural
Selection alone, together with those extensions and develop
ments of it which preserve its essential conception; and this is
the more necessary since the principal theory which has been
developed historically in opposition to Darwin's, the Lamarck-
ian theory, was also held by Darwin, as supplementary to
Natural Selection. It is quite necessary, indeed, to set the

INTRODUCTORY 3

j Lamarckian part of Darwin's views apart from the Darwin
ian part, and to consider the latter alone as true ' Darwinism.'

Lamarck held to evolution, and worked out a theory of
its actual working.1 He supposed that the forces of the envi
ronment worked directly to modify individual animals; and
also that these were greatly modified by their own efforts,
; habits, and activities during life — by 'use and disuse,' that is.
'The modifications of both sorts, occurring continually,
were then inherited from generation to generation, the result
being a continuous change in certain directions which in
time produced the enormous differences found between
different species. The critical and essential factor in this
theory, of course, is that of the inheritance, by the offspring,
of the specific modifications undergone by the parents; for
without this there would be no accumulation of changes from
one generation to another. This was singled out, therefore,
as distinctly the 'Lamarckian factor.' It is known variously
as the principle of ' inheritance of acquired characters,' 'use-
inheritance/ ' Lamarckian inheritance/ 'Lamarck's principle',
'etc.

This principle, so named after Lamarck, has been resolutely
excluded in the later development of Darwinism, although it
was accepted by Darwin himself. For Darwinians have
found the principle of Natural Selection more comprehensive
than its author did; and the ' Neo-Darwinians' of the last
generation — led by the other great discoverer of Natural Se
lection, Alfred Russel Wallace — believe in the 'all-suffi
ciency,' literally understood, of Darwin's law.

What, then, is Darwinism, when the term is so restricted ?
What is Natural Selection ?

1 The reader may consult Prof. H. F. Osborn's From the Greeks
to Darwin, for an exposition of the theories of evolution held before
Charles Darwin.

DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

3 It is simply the fact that some living creatures survive and
propagate their kind when others of the same kind can not.
That is all. Those that survive and propagate appear to have
been 'selected'; but they are naturally selected, without any

' external interference or any further reason of any kind than
just the fact that they survive naturally when others die.
Hence the term 'natural selection.'

How is it, it may be asked, that so simple a fact can be of
such consequence that the mere recognition of it amounts to a

, theory of evolution and establishes a great principle of science.
To answer this question, we may point out the different steps
involved in such a case of survival, with the resulting changes
in the characters of the race when a vast number of such
survivals have taken place during many generations. I will
write down these points formally under numerical head
ings in order to introduce certain necessary terms at each
stage of the exposition.

1. Over-production with Variation. Nature produces
individuals in numbers vastly in excess of those which are
destined to live. In every litter of pigs and every hatching of
fish, there are some born to die or barely to keep alive. But
there are others sure to live and to beget offspring. The
differences constitute ' variation;' which is simply the fact that

' the several cases, when taken together, are individually
different. Some are more ' fit' to survive than others.

2. Struggle for Existence. The result of this overproduc
tion is a struggle or competition among the individuals. The

; little pigs struggle to suckle; the little fish to escape their
enemies — with the result that some win and live, while others
lose and die.

3. Survival of the Fittest.1 Those that win are, of course,
the ones most fit to meet the particular sort of demand made

1 A phrase due to Herbert Spencer.

INTRODUCTORY 5

of them. They have the ' characters' required for the contest
— good wind, strong legs, sharp teeth, etc. The others, the
less fit, are 'eliminated.'

4. Inheritance of Characters. This is the final and most
important link in the chain. Not only must the most fit live;
they must also propagate their kind. The offspring must be
like them m the respect in which they are themselves 'fit.'
If the unfit or less fit are killed off, and so do not propagate
at all, and the more or most fit do, then the next generation
will be, on the average, more fit than the preceding was.
That is, there is an advance from generation to generation
in those characters upon which Natural Selection is acting.
For example, suppose the gunners kill off each season the
largest birds of a certain species before the mating time, then R^^"
only the smaller birds will be left to pair and hatch their
young : the result will be a gradual reduction in the average
size of the whole species.

As nature acts continuously, through her great forces, such
elimination and survival continue through ages; and there
is thus a progressive evolution of characters of all sorts. The
utility of any character to the animal adds to his fitness,
and the useful character is further developed. This, then, is
the theory of Natural Selection, currently called Darwinism.1

!Cf. the remarks, in the Preface, on Wallace's relation to 'Dar
winism.'

CHAPTER I

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY1

/. Special Problems

In any attempt to measure the influence of Darwin in
psychology, we should first of all appreciate the major con
tributions made directly to this subject by Darwin himself.
His theory of 'emotional expression' is one such contribu
tion, and his recognition of the place psychological characters
as such have in organic evolution is another.2

In the first of these, the theory of the rise of emotional
expression, we have a remarkable application of the principle
of natural selection. Darwin's book, The Expression of the
Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) is today the classic
treatment of this subject, both by reason of the wealth
of illustration he gives and also by reason of the fact that
his theory is firmly established. Indeed there are today
no theories in this field that do not essentially include Dar
win's principle of ' serviceable associated habits' ; according to
which emotional expressions are serviceable habits of action,
associated with specific types of mental experience, and fixed

1 Three other discussious of this topic have been brought out
in connection with the Darwin anniversary: Lloyd Morgan's in
the work Darwin and Modern Science, Angell's in the Darwin
Number (May, 1909) of the Psychological Review, and Hall's in the
volume Fifty Years of Darwinism.

2 Darwin's use of psychology in connection with social theory
and ethics, and his remarkable comparative observations upon
human and animal minds, are spoken of in later sections of this
paper.

DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

Pn the organism by natural selection. This theory is not only
iccepted, but it has served to supply a basis for new
theories of the emotions themselves. According to the well-
known 'James-Lange' theory, the emotions, understood in
the sense of the coarser feelings, which are known to have
characteristic modes of physical expression, are due to the
, reporting-back into consciousness, by a ' back-stroke' or organic
reverberation, of the fixed and accomplished expressions.
This theory undoubtedly explains many of the more funda
mental and native emotional reactions; it is both confirm
atory of the original theory of Darwin and supplementary to it.
As to the second point, the recognition of mental char
acters, it appears that Darwin's views have been equally
-influential. He saw that the evolution of mental _charac-
i ters and traits was as important as that of the purely organic,
and that the two were correlated with each other.1 We find in
certain of his theories definite recognition of mental characters,
both as needing to be accounted for and as themselves impor
tant as evidence. In the theory of l sexual selection,' for
example, he recognizes the stimulating effects, through the
senses, of color, form and action, and finds in this the reason
for the evolution of these physical characters in the forms they
actually show. In the theory of the origin of specific 'color
markings' and other superficial characters which make known
one individual of a species to another — a point of view devel
oped by Wallace2 in important ways — mental characters such

1 In another place (Development and Evolution, ch. i, ii), I have
pointed out that there are not two evolutions, one ' organic' and the
other ' mental,' but that mind and body have evolved by one process
and in one series of graduated stages; evolution, that is, has been
' psycho-physical.'

2 Wallace's early reports in journal of Travel (ed. by Murray),
vol. i, may be referred to, as well as his later works. The principal
writings of Alfred Russel Wallace are Darwinism, etc.; Natural Selec
tion: and Tropical Nature; and Studies Scientific and Social.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 9

as observation, recognition, gregarious habit, appetite, etc.,
are cited as affording striking instances of the operation of
natural selection. And it is interesting to note that Darwin
did not merely place the psychic functions and characters on a
par with the physical, as items in which, on account of their
utility, evidence of natural selection might be seen; he
recognized with Lamarck a certain efficiency in the mind itself
to produce, through effort, results which heredity fixed and
transmitted. This is especially to be remarked as showing
Darwin's openness of mind to theories that appeared to be
supported by facts; although, in the result, as psychologists,
we have to look upon his own theory of natural selection as
the true one. The very great importance of psychical char
acters, in connection with the evolution of organic forms
and colors, has now been made out in many cases; notably in the
theories of mimicry and protective coloration, in which not
only the sight and taste but also the ' profiting by experience'—
the ' education' — of individuals comes into play. The develop
ment of the theory of selection with reference to organs and
functions involving joint physical and mental characters is
found at its best in the theory of the rise of animal instinct —
a problem so far-reaching and fundamental that I select
it as a starting point for the further exposition.

Instinct. It is in connection with the problem of instinct,
indeed, that the trying-out of the selection theory in matters
psychological was precipitated. The conditions which made
this question crucial were discerned early in the develop
ment of Darwinian controversies. In such representative
writers as Spencer and Romanes we find the problem empha
sized: the one making instinct the citadel of the defence of
Lamarckian principles, the other finding it necessary to
adhere to Lamarckism, although with growing reluctance,
on account of the difficulties in the way of a purely Darwinian

10 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

view of instinct. One of these writers was polemical against
Darwinism; the other, although on the whole more sympa
thetic, nevertheless joined in the criticism of the view that
I natural selection alone, without the inheritance of acquired
1 characters, was sufficient to account for instinct. The two
great objections to a purely Darwinian theory of instinct may
now be stated.

First, it was maintained in theory that, as instinct is a very
complex function, which becomes of utility to the creature
possessing it only when it is perfect, partial and undeveloped
instincts would be not useless only, but actually damaging.
Imagine an animal having but a partial instinct to swim : liking
the water, but capable only of beginning the movements
necessary to keep afloat. His very tendency to try would
only endanger his life, by taking him into the water. Or
imagine a bird capable only of beginning the very complex
serial processes necessary to build a nest. Where would be
the utility of this, and how would natural selection come into
operation upon these beginnings, to build up the completed
act.2 This is the objection from so-called 'selective value'—
a phrase at one time very current in these discussions. It is
in the case of instinct that the objection based on ' selective
value' is strongest. There must be, it is said, a sufficient
development of the instinct at the start to give it ' selective

value,' and so to secure its further fixing in the fully evolved
j

1 See Romanes' presentation of these objections in his Post-
Darwinian Questions: Heredity and Utility. Darwin's own detailed
reply to them is to be found in the last edition (sixth) of the Origin
of Species, chap, vii; his account of instinct is in ch. viii of the same
work. The present writer's full discussion of these points is to be
found in his Development and Evolution, 1902, ch. v.

2 Darwin himself cites the destructive character of the partial
instinct of certain birds which dispense with nests of their own, and
do not succeed in depositing their eggs cuckoo-like in other birds'
nests. Origin, ed. cit., vol. i, pp. 335 f.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY II

function. Romanes urged this objection consistently to the
last, holding that intelligence must have been operative to
secure these complex adjustments, and that the results of
the accommodations intelligently made must have been
handed down by heredity until the instinct became independ
ent of the intelligence— the whole being known as the theory
of 'lapsed intelligence.'

Second, the objection based on 'correlation' of characters
or co-adaptation. An instinct, it is said, is not a simple
character, of such a sort that we can speak of slight or fluctu
ating variations in it, as we would of variations in length of
nose, or color of skin. On the contrary, it is an act involving
the ' correlation' of many relatively complex and independent
functions all working together with the greatest nicety of
grouping and association. It involves the co-adaptation oK
many parts, of a sort which, when done intentionally,
requires a long and painstaking education of various groups
of muscles, with correlation of the senses, such as vision
with hearing, touch with muscular sense, all in an act slowly
acquired and made habitual. If any element in the
combination fails or is displaced the whole is wrecked. Now,
says the critic, how can ' spontaneous variation,' of a congeni
tal sort, produce these necessary correlations ? Would it not
I require a conspiracy of the forces of variation, distributed in
various and remote portions of the body, to produce such a
joint result, and to produce it at a bound, finished and effec
tive ? Would the laws of chance countenance this ?

This is the objection from 'correlated characters' or 'co-
adaptation,' also strongly urged by Romanes in his latest !
discussions. And to meet them the two writers mentioned,
both of them having claims to psychological consideration,
fell back upon the Lamarckian factor. These co-adaptations,
say they, show the inheritance of the actual learning and prac-

12 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

tice of generations. The American author Cope also
strongly urges these considerations.1

These objections, when stated in general terms in zoology,
have been met by Darwinians in various ways; but the
zoologists, dealing generally with simpler characters, have not
fully realized their force in the case of instinct. The develop
ment of Weismannian views, involving the complete separa
tion of germ-cells and soma or body, and the pre-formation of
organic structures in the germ, which is the exclusive bearer
of the hereditary characters, only sharpened the issue, by
ruling out once for all any directive influence upon evolution
of individual accommodations, including, of course, the
intelligent adjustments which animals abundantly show.
Darwin's hypothesis of 'change of function' — according to
which an earlier but different function in each case served to
preserve the incipient stages of the instinct — while undoubtedly
useful in explaining certain structures in the lower forms of
life, does not fully answer here.2 For even if an instinct be
considered as made up of a variety of simpler functions, as

1 E. D. Cope, The Primary Factors of Organic Evolution. It is
interesting to note that Darwin recognized and often utilized corre
lation, but considered it fundamentally obscure. See Descent of
Man, ed. cit., 'Preface,' and pp. 48 f. It is plain that it was such
cases that led Darwin, also, to the full acceptance of the inheritance of
acquired characters, as a careful reading of his chapter on 'Instinct'
will show (Origin, ch. viii) . In certain arguments he even urges the
improbability of correlated variations. See Origin, pp. 280 and 318.

2 One of Darwin's famous illustrations is that of the derivation of
the lungs from the fish's swim-bladder (Origin, p. 276): see other
cases in the Origin, ch. vii, esp. pp. 309 ff. Darwin also discusses
the cases of imperfect function considered as transitions to complete
instinct (Origin, ed. cit., pp. 330 ff); and his claim that in many
cases the early stages were mere physiological characters, correlated
with other active functions, should not be overlooked (Origin, ed.
cit., p. 266). It is a supposition never yet done justice to in the
discussions of this question.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 13

it usually is, still the combination of them in a single act
would be all the more difficult if they had already become
separately fixed. We find an analogous problem in the learn
ing of any complex new action, such as type- writing or bicycle
riding; we can make the necessary movements separately, but
not only can we not make them together without excessive
pains and much practice, but the practice requires a flexibil
ity of action, and readiness of inhibition, the opposite of
fixity and habit. What is the likelihood, then, that spontane
ous variation would turn out the combination fully formed ?

To the psychologists, at any rate, who are sympathetically
disposed toward Darwinism in principle, the problem of
instinct comes, in view of such difficulties as these, to repre
sent that of the method of evolution itself; at the same time
that the extreme facility and ease of the Lamarckian solution
does not appeal to them — with some eminent exceptions,
notably Spencer and Wundt — for it in turn leads to conclu
sions which are quite unacceptable. If experience is inherited
why have not racial psychological experiences of the most
ancient and uniform order — such as those of space percep
tion, time estimation, verbal speech, the rudiments of the
three 'r's,' drilled into every child and used with absolute
uniformity throughout life — why have not such functions
become congenital ? To many psychologists, the Lamarck
ian theory has seemed, on the whole, too easy and superficial.

One has only to compare Wundt's weak defence * of ' use-
inheritance,' with James' radical criticism2 of Spencer, to
see on which side the balance of psychological opinion would
be likely to array itself.3

1 W. Wundt, Human and Animal Psychology (Eng. Trans.)
- W. James, Principles of Psychology, vol. ii, last chapter.
3 Darwin's chief discussion of the effects of use and disuse is to
be found in his work, Variation in Plants and Animals under Domesti
cation.

14 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

It was through Weismann, however, that this problem
again became urgent in biological circles, and two of his most
famous hypotheses were framed to extricate the Darwinian
principle: the hypotheses of ' Intra-selection' and 'Germinal
Selection.' Both are attempts to deal with complex and
correlated characters without resort to the Lamarckian prin
ciple. Weismann's criticism of Lamarckism and his con
structive views on heredity" are equally famous.1

Intra-selection. This principle of Weismann was an exten
sion of the very fruitful conception of Roux, called by him
the 'struggle of the parts,'2 a conception which carried the
idea of natural selection into the adjustment of parts to one
another within the organism. Weismann generalized this
in his famous Romanes lecture at Oxford, on Intra-selection?
and gave to Roux' 'struggle of the parts' a more func
tional turn. The correlations of the organism are brought
about, he supposed, during development through the actual
flexibility of the organs. The muscles accommodate them
selves to the growing of the bone, the strength of neck to the
weight of horns, the grouping of functions to the require
ments of the situations of life, in the greatest detail. This
is considered so essential and radical a process from the start
in each individual's career, that the living habits of an animal
species are constant and progressive only because the detailed
processes of intra-selection are repeated in an identical way
generation after generation, by every individual creature of
the kind in question. Thus — and this is essential to Weis
mann's view — the continuity of the 'germ-plasm' remains
undisturbed; it is the 'soma,' the body, that is molded and

1 See A. Weisman, Essays upon Heredity. (Eng. trans.)

2 Roux, 'Die Kampf der Theile im Organismus' (1881), Gesam.
Abhand. ueber Entwicklungsmechanik d. Organismen, Vol. i.

3 The Effect of External Influences upon Development, A. Weis
mann. (1894.)

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 15

remolded in analogous ways and with identical results in all
the individuals of successive generations.

It is interesting to note that originally this idea of a se
lective process within the organism — a fruitful extension of
Darwin's principle — was not exclusvely the biologist's posses
sion. It was independently conceived by certain psychologists
at about the same time. Theories of organic accommoda
tion or adjustment involving an ' over-production' of move
ments, with a resulting selection of favorable combinations
or 'happy hits,' had been advanced by Spencer and Bain, to
account for the learning of acts of skill, quite apart from the
question of evolution. Spencer's hypothesis was very general :
he merely postulated an ' excess discharge' from the nervous
centers, in certain conditions, from which 'happy hits' or
adaptations were made. Bain made the theory more pre
cise, holding that pleasure resulting from the fortunate com
binations 'clinched' these movements; while pain inhibited
the unfortunate ones, and so the adjustments secured were
preserved. Later theories have worked definitely on this
basis, applying directly and consciously the idea of natural
selection, and using the term 'functional selection' or some
similar expression for the fixing of accommodative move
ments.1

This is a more psychological or psycho-physical theory than
those of Roux and Weismann. It gives a solution indeed prac
tically identical in result with theirs, but having the added
motive of Darwinian selection. The psychologists give

1 A critical account of the theories of Spencer and Bain is to be
found in ch. vii of my work, Mental Development (1894; 3d ed.,
1906). 'Functional Selection' was suggested in that work (Mental
Development, 2nd ed., 1895); it is used by Lloyd Morgan, A nimal
Behaviour, and others. See also the writer's earlier article,
'The Origin of Volition,' in Proc. Int. Cong, of Psychol., London,
1892.

1 6 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

attention to the actual processes as they take place in the
individual.

But this is not all. The biologists and comparative psy
chologists have together closed in upon the problem of learn
ing in general. The problem of 'educability,' of 'profiting
by experience,' has been attacked throughout the entire range
of organic forms, with striking harmony of results, summed
up by the phrase 'trial and error.' From the infusoria's
limited modification of behavior1 to the child's extended
education, it is found that all learning is by a process of
strenuous, excessive, and varied discharges. Through such
discharges adjustive modifications occur in the mass of
earlier habits ; pleasure and pain, and in the higher animals,
attention, being the regulating functions. It takes place in a
manner to which the Darwinian conception of selection is
strictly applicable. Quite apart, then, from the details of
the analysis in particular cases, and from the problem of
isolating the psychic and organic factors involved, we may
record this result as a striking application of Darwin
ism.

Its bearing on the question of the origin of instinct is, how
ever, still very ambiguous. Are we to stop with Weismann
and hold that these complicated processes of learning specific
acts are repeated by every individual of every generation,
with no effect upon the variations of the germ -plasm, and no
influence upon heredity ? If so, how could they be embodied
in instinct ?

Weismann saw the difficulty of securing the perfection of
the instincts on such a basis; either it amounts to denying that
the seemingly perfect instincts are ever congenital, or if it be

1 See Jennings, The Behavior of the Lower Organisms; and for
higher animals, LI. Morgan, Animal Behaviour, and the literature
cited in Washburn's The Animal Mind.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 1 7

allowed that they are congenital, it encounters the criticisms
urged by Romanes and others — to the effect that the prelimi
nary stages are useless, and the necessary correlations of
characters are most unlikoly. Weismann therefore made a
further application of the selection principle to the germinal J
elements themselves, finding the locus of struggle and survival
still more hidden within the organism. This is the hypothesis
of Germinal Selection.1 Apart from any experimental evi
dence for this conception, it may be said that it makes the
theory of preformism more ironclad than ever, since the germs
selected bear their intrinsic potencies of development.

Organic Selection. It appeared clear to others that the
hypothesis of germinal selection was not necessary — so far as
the problem of instinct was concerned. The conditions of
the problem were now so clearly defined that a further sugges
tion was made simultaneously by certain psychologists and
biologists alike,2 which showed that the resources of Dar
winism were not exhausted.3 It appeared evident that if
Darwin's principle of variation with selection, on the one

1 This, as well as the other important hypotheses of Weismann,
is expounded systematically in his general treatise, The Evolution
Theory, 1904; see also his paper in the Cambridge anniversary
volume Darwin and Modern Science.

2 LI. Morgan, F. H. Osborn and the present writer (to whom
the name 'Organic Selection' is due). The original papers of all
these writers (of date 1896), together with expositions by Poulton
and others, are collected in my volume Development and Evolution
(1902). Prof. LI. Morgan gives a new statement in the Cambridge
volume, Darwin and Modern Science, 1909, pp. 428-9. In the
same volume (p. 41) Prof . Weismann cites his Romanes lecture as
having anticipated the theory of Organic Selection. As I have
already discussed the point elsewhere, Development and Evolution,
pp. i83ff, it need not be taken up again. In any case the theory
is strengthened by Prof. Weismann's adhesion to it.

3 It was actually in discussions of instinct, indeed, that Prof.
LI. Morgan and the present writer hit upon this conception.

1 8 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

hand, and Weismann's principle of 'intra-selection,' taken
with the psychologist's 'functional selection,' on the other
hand — if these principles were true, then a further result fol
lowed of itself. If, that is, a selection of processes and habits
goes on within the organism — a functional selection resulting
in a real molding of the individual — there would be at every
stage of growth a combination of congenital characters with
\ acquired modifications; natural selection would fall in each
case upon this joint or correlated result; and the organisms
showing the most effective combinations would survive.
Variation plus modification, the joint product actually present
at the time the struggle comes on, this is what selection pro
ceeds upon, and not, as strict neo-Darwinism or Weismann-
ism supposes, upon the congenital variations taken alone.

The result is that variation would tell most when in the
direction in which the accommodations were being made and
found useful; and on the other hand, accommodations would
be made where the variations best permitted. There would
then be an accumulation of variations, 'coincident'1 in
direction with the acquired modifications, the function becom
ing more and more congenital from generation to generation.
The accommodations and modifications of the individual
serve as a supplement or screen to his endowment; and in
course of time the endowment factor, by variation simply,
with no resort to the actual inheritance of acquired charac
ters, comes to its perfection. This result of the 'coincidence'
of modification and variation in guiding the course of evolu-
tion2 has been called 'organic selection.'

1 A phrase due to Lloyd Morgan. See his volume, Habit and
Instinct.

2 The general point of view has been styled that of evolution
by ' Orthoplasy.' On the terminology of this theory, see Nature,
l897. P- 558. This point of view is strictly Darwinian; but neither
this way of putting the factors together, nor the results which follow

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 1 9

This result of the operation of the recognized factors is
very simple and very evident. It meets both the objections
urged to the Darwinian theory of instinct. For, first, it

from it — the opportunity it gives to mind to guide and direct evolu
tion, by preserving and forwarding variations in intelligent and
social lines — occurred to Darwin; probably because he was more and
more ready in critical cases to accept Lamarckism, as, for example,
in his discussions of the origin of the giraffe's neck (Origin, vol. i,
pp. 276 ff.), and of the American monkey's prehensile tail (ibid, vol.
i, p. 294), both cases in which active accommodation with coincident
variations are actually sufficient. A similar case is before me as I
write, observing the swans of Lake Geneva. The young of different
stages of development show relatively different length of neck.
Those with longer necks can feed under water over a greater area of
the bottom. Constant stretching of the neck not only develops
each swan, but may be supposed to have encouraged variations in
the direction of longer neck, that is variations coincident in direction
with their active accommodative processes. So the long neck has
been evolved. — Darwin held with great consistency that instincts
have been gained, step by step, "through the variability of the mental
organs and natural selection, without any conscious intelligence
on the part of the animal, during each successive generation."
Descent of Man, ed. cit., p. 77. See also, p. 76. In one case only
do I find that Darwin recognized the results, in the way of continued
' coincident' variation, which follow upon individual accommodation
or habit. I have just come upon the passage, which I quote:

"It has been objected," he says "to the foregoing view of the origin
of instincts that the variations of structure and of instinct must have
been simultaneous and accurately adjusted to each other, as a modi
fication in the one without any immediate corresponding change in
the other would have been fatal. The force of this objection rests
entirely on the assumption that the changes in the instincts and
structure are abrupt. To take as an illustration the case of the
larger titmouse, this bird often holds the seeds of the yew between its
teeth on a branch, and hammers with its beak till it gets at the
kernel. Now what special difficulty would there be in natural
selection preserving all the slight individual variations in the shape
of the beak, which were better and better adapted to break open the
seeds, until a beak was formed as well constructed for this purpose
as that of the nuthatch, at' the same time that habit, or compulsion,
or spontaneous variations of taste, led the bird to become more and

20 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

accounts for the immature stages of the instinct, by recogniz
ing that at these stages the endowment is supplemented
by accommodations sufficient to give them selective value: a
'little sense' perhaps, as in imitation or play, is displayed.1
In this way the appearance of intelligence — of 'lapsed intelli
gence' — is given to the function; for evolution has advanced by
the aid, and in the direction, of conscious adjustment. And,
second, it not only allows, it makes use of, the widest corre
lation of characters; for in the processes of intra-selection and
functional selection, just the molding and correlation of the
parts to an organic end is what is most telling for survival.2
Let these keep the species alive for generations, as Weismann
supposes, or through what Darwin calls 'transitions,' while
coincident variations are being accumulated to supersede
them, as the hypothesis of organic selection supposes, and
there results a congenital correlation, such as is shown in the
complex instincts. There is the appearance of what

more a seed eater? In this case the beak is supposed to be slowly
modified by natural selection, subsequently to, but in accordance with
slowly changing habits or taste." He then goes on to suppose the
contrary process taking place in the feet — the habits following
variations in structure toward increased size. This is a perfectly
clear resort to the hypothesis of 'organic selection,' and while it is
simply thrown out in a single instance and not taken advantage of
in other cases, it still shows that Darwin would have sympathized
with the more extended use made of the principle by certain con
temporary writers. (The italics are mine.)

*It was shown by Professor James Ward, Art. 'Psychology,'
Ency. Brit., ninth edition, who used the term 'Subjective Selection'
to characterize the influence of consciousness, that the presence of
mind would enable the animal to ' select' his environment in some
measure.

2 This aspect of the matter has been especially dwelt upon in my
own discussions, in contrast to those of Morgan and Osborn (see
Devel. and Evolution, chap, xiv.) It was suggested to me in the
course of prolonged experiments upon the learning of adjustive
acts by young children.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY

21

Romanes, Cope and other Lamarckians assume — the inherit
ance of modifications — but it is accomplished by the operation
of Darwinian factors only.

This point of view has been generalized for all those
functions in which acquired modifications are combined with
variations in the life history of the organism;1 it is difficult
to find any, indeed, in which they are not so combined.

It also explains the decay of congenital characters (e. g.,
of instincts) where this occurs; for in cases where the intelli
gent or other adjustive factor is on the whole of greater
utility, variations toward the disintegration of the instinctive
congenital part, would be selected.

Diagram illustrating the rise and decay of a congenital function,
such as instinct, g, g/ etc. = succession generations; Ef = line of
effective function; le, lef = course of evolution; e, e, etc. = congeni
tal endowment; a, a', etc. = functional accommodation. Natural
selection falls upon the effective function ae, a'e', etc.; and utility
alone determines when the congenital endowment e,e', etc., shall be
favored by selection, as shown in the ascending line le, or when it
shall fall away in favor of the accommodative factor (a, a' etc.), as
shown in the descending line le'. The striking case of the latter is
that of the growth of intelligent action superseding instinctive.

Having thus illustrated, by means of the most complex
functions in the whole range of animal habit, the working out

1 See the section on 'Plasticity,' just below.

22 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

j of Darwin's principles, we may now broaden our view to take
in more explicitly the psychological aspects of evolution.
The theory just outlined presents, "to my mind, the only
I approach we have to an intrinsic union of biology and psychol-
i ogy in the handling of the evolution problem. It is plain
1 that such a derivation of instinct makes use of the presence
of the rudiment of mind, wherever it is found, among the
accommodative processes which act to preserve variations.
For as I have just said, give the animal a little sense1 — a grain
of the capacity to 'profit by experience,' to imitate, to co
operate, to deceive,2 to remember and distinguish what is
good for it from what is bad — a bit of intelligence, broadly
understood, and he is started on the career of learning in
comparison with which his earlier achievements become
quite insignificant. If, in short, we are to allow that accommo
dative or learning processes of whatever kind do have any
influence, however indirect, on the course of evolution, then
that prime, that superb weapon of learning, mind, comes to
its own and starts upon its splendid career. But if this be so,
if mind be natural and also useful, then we are still of course
within the Darwinian circle of ideas. Why are not mental
faculties and functions to be considered characters which
have been evolved by selection for their utility ?

Darwin held this, as we see by reading again the Descent of
Man, chapters iii and iv, which constitute still one of the best
treatises on Comparative Psychology. But instead of the
desultory recognition of the place and effectiveness of mental
states in a theory dealing mainly with the physical, we now see

1 "A little dose of judgment or reason, as Pierre Huber expresses
it, often comes into play, even with animals low in the scale of nature. "
Darwin, Origin, ed. cit., p. 320.

2 Darwin cites the admirable instance of a race of rats surviving
in competition with others by reason of their superior 'cunning.'
Des. of Man, ed. cit., p. 91

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 23

the universal principle of the relation of mental to organic evo
lution. Mind is correlated with plasticity, its evolution with
that of brain and nerves. The history of the evolution of
these organs is also that of the evolution of mind. In this
we have the next great step in which biology and psychology
join hands in a safe and accomplished generalization: that of
the correlation of nervous plasticity with mind, of 'educa-
bility' with 'sense.'

Plasticity and Mind. One of the striking features, perhaps
the most striking, of the evolution of mammals is the progress
1 made by the brain. It is the organ of increasing plasticity and
; 'educability.'1 Its evolution has been correlated with the
decline of the instinctive and completely congenital functions.
As we advance upward in the mammalian scale, we find
decreasing instinctive endowment and increasing plasticity,
accompanied by increasing mental capacity and educability.
The human infant is poorest in instinctive endowment, most
helpless at birth, but most teachable and most highly equipped
with brain and mind.2 This means that, the utility of the
conscious type of action once established, the premium put on
variations in that line, carrying with them more plastic nerv
ous substance and decaying congenital functions, was both
enormous and effective. Once begun, intelligent adjustment

1 A term used by Sir Ray Lankester (Nature, Ixi, 1900, p. 624: see
also Lankester's The Kingdom of Man, p. 123), who has pointed
out the important genetic correlations of increasing plasticity.

2 In Darwin's phrase, Descent of Man, ed. cit., p. 124, in man,
instinct is replaced by 'impulse guided by reason and experience.
Darwin's use of terms is that followed here. The contention that man
has a great many instincts involves the definition of instinct
according to which all native impulses or tendencies come under the
term— a very confusing usage. According to our usage an instinct
is a function carried out in a definite way, although not always perfectly,
without learning.

24 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

supersedes all other kinds. So we find a remarkable inter
mingling of types of function and even of different ways of
performing the same function, in the higher animals and
man. The union of mental and organic characters found fit,
in the way mentioned above, has varied with the relative util
ity attaching to one combination or another1 (cf . the Diagram) .
Some functions of urgent and vital importance have remained
instinctive or reflex. In other cases, the instinctive has been
largely or in part superceded by the intelligent. We find a
very wide range of cases of more or less ' imperfect' instincts
in which we may see intelligent learning actually supplement
ing the imperfect native reactions. Natural selection falls
upon the combination, and the best combination wins out—
sometimes this, sometimes that. Where a reflex of extreme
rapidity, as the reflex winking of the eye, is of importance, it is
preserved, in spite of the duplication of the function from the
higher centers of voluntary and intelligent action. In other
cases, such as the movement of the ear in man,2 all utility
seems to have vanished from both types of action, although in
certain of the lower forms the ear movements are most
important for acuteness of hearing and the localization of
sounds. All this takes place in detail while the great progres
sion in mind, in plasticity, in learning capacity, is going on.
Some functions replaced by intelligence are running down
hill, while others, not getting the full utility of the intelligence,
or having a special utility of their own, are being built up,
both processes alike being fed by variation.

The force of this, for our present purpose, is this: plasticity

1 Cf . Lloyd Morgan's illustration from the habits of young chicks
Habit and Instinct. See also K. Groos, The Play of Animals and
The Play of Man.

2 A case interestingly discussed by Darwin, Descent of Man,
ed. cit., p. 15. The duplication of functions in this sense is fully
discussed in my Development and Evolution, ch. vi, sec. i.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 25

is a real character, a character the opposite of fixity. It is
opposed even to the potential sort of fixity assumed by pre-
formism — the theory that all subsequent adjustments are
already present potentially in the germ. It leaves to the
organism genuine alternatives; genuine novelties of adjust
ment are possible. And consciousness, intelligence, is also
a real character, correlated with plasticity. Both are present
together, however we may account for it; and both have been
advanced for their utility, as Darwin's hypothesis requires.1
The Utility of Mind. A further word remains to be said
concerning the utility of mind, or of the intelligent type of
function. Intelligence is of the nature of a general or
'blanket' function: it can be turned here and there for the
performance of anything within its reach. It has its early
illustrations among the animals in imitation and play, to
which such general utility attaches. It has only recently
been shown how enormously useful both imitation and play
are to many species, especially in their family and gregarious
habits. We see in these functions, as in the more developed
intelligent functions, ways in which many of the organic
processes — the exceptions being of the vegetative and reflex
sorts — maybe directly supplemented, by the creature's efforts
consciously directed, to the actual saving of its life. This
becomes, then, a capital instance of the operation of 'organic
selection;' of the union and joint utility of congenital and
acquired characters, for the incidence of natural selection.
Since the utility attaches to the combination, it is the combina
tion that has survived in various forms, reaching its culmina
tion in the mind and brain of man.

1 See Darwin's terse sentences concerning the origin of the
intellectual faculties by natural selection, Descent of Man, ed. cit.,
p. 140. In his detailed discussions, chapters iii and iv of the same
work, his object is to show that man's mind differs only in degree of
development from the animal's.

26 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

This we may call Darwinism psycho-physically applied.
It is well, of course, to cast about for other principles — to work
out Vitalism, Mendelism, Mutationism, etc.1 — in those sciences
which do not have to deal with the problem of adaptation,
or of the accommodation of the organism through its external
characters. But wherever the question arises of the relation
of organisms inter se, and to the environing conditions of
their life, the foregoing are not only the fruitful principles,
they are the only principles we are able to consider at all.
Variation, accommodation, selection — these three.
. Psychologists are of necessity concerned with the relations
of individuals as wholes to one another and the world
of nature. Their problems are those of accommodation and
adaptation; of action, and of thinking considered in
relation to action. We find, therefore, that the explana
tions due to Darwinism are bringing this great field into
fruitful union with biology; and the recognition of joint men
tal and physical characters, utilities, and selections, is of the
greatest evidential value for Darwinism. It more than off
sets any weakening that may have seemed to come in recent
years from embryology or cytology; for it adds to the range of
Darwin's principle the whole stretch of the humanities, the
sciences of the life and works of man. It is to the credit of
Darwin himself that he did not claim to have discovered the
principles of the minute internal organization of animals,
with which the newer biological sciences concern themselves;
and even his principle of variation left the questions of the

1 All these types of theory are well represented, both pro and con,
in the memorial volumes cited, and I need not discuss them here.
It is necessary, however, to deprecate the animus that some writers
of these schools show toward Darwin's theory. T.H.Morgan (vitalist)
writes a veritable caricature of Darwinism (in his Evolution and
Adaptation) and Bateson (mutationist) enters the bull-ring when
ever he hears of fluctuating variations.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 27

origin, exact extent and range of such changes open for the
detailed investigations of the future.1

We should expect, however, that such a thing as conscious
ness, mind, having the critical utility and enormous develop
ment now assigned to it, would show some characteristic laws
of operation; and that, in the carrying over of Darwinian
principles into this field, certain modifications and exten
sions of these principles would be come upon. This is
the case. The first general question to which I wish to
advert in this connection is one about which certain of the
fiercest controversies have been waged — the question of
heredity.

Heredity, Physical and Social. It will have been noticed
that in the foregoing we have assumed that the operation
of heredity is restricted to congenital characters, finding it
unnecessary to believe that acquired modifications are handed
down. In this position, the general rej ection of the Lamarck-
ian view of heredity, now common to biologists and psy
chologists alike, is concurred in. The variations which we
find available for physical inheritance are congenital changes;
the utility of individual modifications is confined to their
influence in screening, supplementing and preserving the natu
ral equipment of individuals and species, and thus directing
the course of evolution. We have no reason to depart from
this position in the matter of mental variations and the educa
tion of the individual. Mental characters already congenital!
are inherited; and the plasticity, which intelligence carries!
with it, is a congenital character. There is no evidence of the
transmission of the results of mental education or experience;
but both physical and mental endowments and the variations
arising in them are subject to continuous physical transmis-

1 His candid confession, already cited, of ignorance as to the
causes of ' correlation' is a case in point.

28 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

sion.1 So far the consistent application of Darwinian
principles.

But when we come to ask for a full account of the propaga
tion of mental acquisitions from generation to generation,
we find it necessary to recognize another form of handing
down or real transmission. Once admit that the intelligence,
even in its simplest forms, as seen in imitation, play and the
resulting accommodative actions, can be applied to the learn
ing of anything, and that variations in plasticity are selected
to allow of its development — this once admitted, we have the
Vpossibility of a continuous handing down from generation to
generation, a 'social heredity,'2 which is no longer subject to
the limitations set upon physical heredity. This recognition
of the continuity of tradition or social heredity is of great
importance in the social sciences; and it is not foreign to
^biology and psychology. It is found in operation in animal
companies, where imitation is active to enable the young to

1 We may, of course, follow Darwin's prudent example, and
await further evidence; but since his time the supposed instances of
inheritance of acquired modifications have been one by one given
up, and today such inheritance, even if admitted, would be restricted
to cases of modification of the germ plasm; and this is practically
only another name for variation in the Darwinian sense. Recent
experiments on the artificial modification of the germ cells, as those
of MacDougal on plants (Carnegie Inst. publications, No. 81; see
also a paper by MacDougal in the Darwin memorial volume, Fifty
Years of Darwinism, New York, 1909), show that the results of
such modification are not ' specific/ that is, not in lines that could be
likened to the inheritance of specific changes; but 'general,' and
akin to the spontaneous variations that occur under the action of
changed environmental conditions. It should always be remem
bered that Lamarckian inheritance, as a working principle, 'requires
the reproduction in the offspring of specifically the same modification
as that which the parent underwent.

2 This phrase was introduced by the present writer in his
Social and Ethical Interpretations, ist ed., where the principle is
worked out in detail.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 29

learn the actions, calls, and general behavior of parents and
associates. Darwin and Wallace1 both early recognized
this factor at work in the family life of animals and birds. It
will recur below in our consideration of the social sciences;
here I briefly call attention to this factor, in order to discuss
the gregarious sort of variations it requires and develops
under the action of natural selection.

Gregariousness. We are all familiar with the general fact
of gregarious habit among the animals. We may use the
term for all sorts of natural association in families, companies,
etc. We are also very sure that much of this has an instinct
ive basis, and also that in some cases much of it is acquired.
In fact there seems to be usually an adjustment of native and
acquired elements, a ' joint' state or union of characters very
similar to that which we have found to be required for the
derivation of instinct and the rise of intelligence.

So soon, however, as we inquire as to the sort of variations
such gregarious habits or instincts require, we find a most
interesting correlation not before brought before us. It is
plain that for any sort of co-operative habit to which utility
would attach, two or more individuals must be brought into a
mode of common action. Either they must be prepared to
unite in doing the one thing jointly, or their activities and
characters must be so correlated that the action of one will
supplement and make effective the action or characters of
the other.2 For example, in an animal or bird family,

1 See Darwin, Descent of Man, ed. cit., pp. 77, 82, and 97, and
his citation from Wallace, Contrib. to Natural Selection, p. 212, a
point much developed in later publications by Wallace. Darwin
probably overestimated the 'perfection' of many of the animal
instincts at the first performance; Wallace shows that they are often
very imperfect until supplemented by imitative learning.

3 Darwin discusses such cases, e.g., the correlation of the mam
mary gland in the mother with the sucking instinct of the young,
(Origin, ed. cit., vol. i., p. 296).

30 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

the parental instincts on the side of the old must be correlated
with the filial activities on the side of the young. The
hen 'clucks,' the chicks respond by action or call. Either
without the other would serve no purpose and would not
survive. So we may say that in a great group of cases illus
trating such modes of behavior, nature has had to provide
not simply a correlation of characters within a single organism,
but as between two or more different individuals. And we
come to ask how this extraordinary state of things could have
been secured. What sort of variations would be required to
secure and develop native social or gregarious habits?

It is evident at the outset that the objections to Darwinism
already stated would hold here with increased force. If
variations affecting two or more individuals at once, and
different in character, are required, what is the likelihood of
their occurring together unless some effect of the actual
association in life of the individuals be reflected in their
heredity? And if the facts of correlation present difficulty
when a single individual's behavior is in question, what does
the difficulty become in interpreting correlations of characters
extending to a group ? The inheritance of one of the indi
viduals would represent only a part of the required action,
the other part being bound up in the inheritance of other
individuals. It would seem that here we have a case in which
only the actual experiences of the animal's life would give the
clue to the sort of variations to be found serviceable.

The resources of Darwinism, as explained above, are ade
quate to meet this case also, provided we admit the opera
tion of 'organic selection' as described, upon the joint corre
lations actually established in life. That is, we must hold
that the actual life activities keep certain individuals alive in
associated pairs, groups, etc., the co-ordinated actions being of
utility, while the individual actions required are gradually

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 31

being molded by variation from generation to generation and
fitted together for the performance of the joint function.
In each generation, groups of individuals best fitted for the
joint action would be formed. Coincident variations would
accumulate for each type of individual according to the requirej
ments of the gregarious habit. Thus the several types of
individuals are selected with reference to their ability to play
each his part 'for the benefit of the community' (Darwin,
loc. cit., p. 70) ', and the whole group is selected because of the
utility of their cooperation. The united function screens
and preserves the individuals able to take part in it; and
while thus screened and preserved, the variations toward its
better performance are produced, fitted together, and selected.
It is a further and very important instance of the operation of
organic selection.

But here again the utility of the psychological factors comes
prominently into view. The fact that each of the young,
through imitation, play, etc., learns the established traditions
of behavior, adds immensely to the fitness both of the
individuals and of the group. The young are trained for the
performance of their essential parts, and their lives are thus
saved. The group having the largest and most effective tra
dition is selected; and with its selection, the variations are
allowed which again make possible further congenital
equipment in gregarious lines2 and the decay of individual
habits to allow for greater gregariousness.

1 See Darwin's account of the instincts of ants, especially the
theory of the origin of 'neutre' ants (Origin of Species, ed. cit., pp.
354 ff.). As in other instances, Darwin here chose the hardest possible
case, as a test of his theory.

a Darwin, Descent of Man, ed. cit., p. 72, cites man's 'intelligence'
and 'social qualities' as the characters which take the place of
"natural weapons, so that it might have been an immense advantage
to man to have sprung from some comparatively weak creature."

32 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

We may thus account for all the various perfect, partial
and imperfect social instincts. Groups of animals show all
possible stages in the combination of the factors of endowment
and tradition. The two sorts of heredity, physical and social,
work hand in hand, the latter taking the lead in marking out
the direction and affording protection, while the slower
processes of physical heredity follow in its wake. The result
ing state of relative stability and equilibrium varies with the
actual utilities of the case. In the animals, there is much
organic and congenital gregarious activity; in man, the physi
cal development has culminated in the perfected brain,1 and
the ' traditional' mode of handing down is that by which all
the accretions on the mental side are preserved.2

Summing up our conclusions so far with reference to Dar
winism in Psychology we may say:

_ (i) The individual's learning processes are by a method of
functional 'trial and error' which illustrates 'natural' in the
form of 'functional selection.'

(2) Such acquisitions, taken jointly with his endowment,
give him the chance of survival through 'natural,' in the form
of 'organic selection.'

(3) By his learning, he brings himself into the traditions
of his group, thus coming into possession of his social heritage,
which is the means of his individual survival in the processes
of 'social and group selection.'

1 Darwin quotes with approval Wallace's opinion that man is
little liable to bodily modifications by natural selection, "for man is
able through his mental faculties to keep with an unchanged body in
harmony with a changing universe." Descent of Man, p. 144; see
also p. 159.

2 Certain of the general bearings of natural and organic selec
tion in the account of social development are well brought out by
Gulick, Evolution, Racial and Habitudinal (publications of the Carnegie
Institution of Washington, No. 25).

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY

(4) Thus preserved the individual's endowment or physical
heredity is, through variation, directed in intelligent and
gregarious lines through ' natural' as 'organic selection.'

(5) Individuals become congenitally either more gregarious
or more intelligent for the maintenance of the group life,
according as the greater utility attaches to one or the other
in the continued operation of these modes of selection.

It is thus that a Darwinian foundation is laid for the more
complex sciences which deal with the development of the
individual in psychological and social ways.

//. Genetic Psychology

The further development of the social sciences requires
the detailed working out of the methods of individual
accommodation or learning. This requirement is reflected
in the recent striking advances made in Genetic Psychology,
which has two great branches: Comparative and Social
Psychology. In both of these— that is, in Genetic Psy
chology as a whole — important principles have been found at
work which afford further illustrations of the vitality of
the Darwinian theory.

Play. In the play function recent writers, especially
K. Groos,1 have discovered one of the instruments of the
highest utility in the learning process. It is believed to be a
function by which immature and undeveloped tendencies and
endowments are practised, in conditions which escape the
actual struggle and stress of life, and so give the ' trial and
error' method its full opportunity. Animals play in the line of
their later activities, and so make themselves proficient for
the serious struggle for existence. Both the personal and the
gregarious impulses are thus brought to perfection behind

1 K. Groos, The Play of Animals, and The Play of Man, both in
English translation.

34 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

the screen of play. Play is a generalized native impulse toward
the exercise of specific and useful activities. It is itself a
functional character which has arisen by the selection, among
the individuals of a very great number of animal forms, of
variations toward the early and artificial use of their growing
powers. It is a natural and powerful tendency in vigorous
and growing young; in fact, it is an impulse of extraordinary
strength and persistence, and of corresponding utility.

On the psychological side, a corresponding advance has
been made in the interpretation of the state of 'make-believe/
which accompanies and excites to the indulgence of play.
Make-believe is found in animals of many orders and is strik
ingly developed in the child. It leads to a sort of sustained
imagination of situations, treated as if real — a playful
'dramatization' — in which the most important principles of
individual and social life are tentatively and experimentally
illustrated. Play thus becomes a most important sphere of
practice, not only on the side of the physical powers, but
also in intellectual, social, and moral lines.

Moreover, once learned, this method of experimentation
by imaginative make-believe is extended, as the individual's
powers mature, to the more theoretical and voluntary
functions. Recent work in logic1 and aesthetics has shown that
the instrumental or hypothetical characters of knowledge-
seen in experimental science — and the characters of detach
ment and ' semblance' in art, have their roots in this sort of
imaginative forecasting of what may be or might be true.

Imitation. The impulse to imitate is the companion to
that of play. It is the same sort of tendency in type — a native
generalized activity. It is a sort of social counterpart to the
play tendency; for by playing in imitative ways young animals
are brought into fruitful and useful cooperation. The

1 See chapter iv of this paper below.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 35

correlation actually holds between them, indeed; animal and
human plays are both imitative and social. Among the ani
mals, both impulses seem to be largely restricted to the activities
which are to come into play in adult life. With advance in
the scale of life, however, and especially in the anthropoidal
and human forms, both become more plastic and more intelli
gent, thus allowing them wider application to all the processes
of learning. In the development of the human individual,
these two functions, imitation and play, become the principl^
instruments used by nature for the development of the
individual's native powers, and for leading him into the mass
of culture called 'social tradition.' This latter province of
imitation is taken up again below. The actual mechanism
of both impulses illustrates throughout the Darwinian prin
ciple of selection by trial and error.1

Origin of the Faculties. Genetic psychology also teaches
that in the foregoing principles we have in outline an account
of the origin of the mental faculties as illustrated in the series
of minds from lower animals up to man. Before man, we
find the sort of 'profiting by experience' which comes with
learning through trial and error, and the conservation in
great habits of the accommodations thus secured. A habit
is simply a tendency to do again what has once been done,
whenever the slightest suggestion appears of the original con
ditions of action. This suggestion may come through a re
newal of the actual conditions, or simply through memory —

1 Darwin makes interesting remarks in various places on the
utility of imitation, e.g., Descent of Man, ed. cit., pp. 82, 146. Cf.
also various titles cited sub verbo in the Diet, of Philosophy.

The writer's Mental Development contains detailed discussions of
the place and r61e of Imitation. I find in what is known as ' per
sistent imitation' or 'try-try-again,' in the child, a striking case of
' trial and error' and learning through that process. The earliest
cases of volition are of this type, and volition throughout illustrates
persistent imitation directed upon ideas or ends.

36 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

whether this be a mere residual or trace of the original func
tion, or an actual revived image. The imaging faculty finds
here its raison d'etre and utility : it enables the animal to utilize
his earlier experiences in conditions remote in time and place
from the original situation.

A further step is taken when images are used experiment
ally or instrumentally for purposes of adjustment by trial and
error, a process for which the play function affords excellent
opportunity. The child playfully imagines all sorts of situa
tions, and experiments upon them with direct utility to him
self and his group.

Finally, in the operations of thought, involving adjustment
to the common or 'general' aspects of things, this process of
trial-and-error becomes the conscious and explicit method of
progress in knowledge and conduct. Among the animals, the
best authorities find this shown in a rudimentary way in the
case of the higher anthropoids, which are able, on occasion, to
readjust a habitual way of action to a somewhat changed
situation. This has been called 'practical judgment'1; it is
no doubt a preliminary stage in the development of theoretical
judgment which uses 'general' ideas. Thus interpreted, the
operations of thought or 'reason' are shown to be evolved
from simple processes of accommodation which rest upon trial
and error and habit. The 'general' idea is a general way of

1 See Hobhouse, Mind in Evolution. Darwin gives two good
instances of such procedure, on the part of an elephant and a bear,
in Descent of Man, ed. cit., p. 86. The reader should also look
up the remarkable passage (ibid., p. 93-4) in which Darwin com
pares the dog's attitude toward dogs generally with its changed
attitude when it discovers 'the other dog to be a friend,' and points
out the dog's characteristic action of ' searching' for something when
given the signal to search. Such 'general' actions he thinks denote
abstract ideas.

DARWINISM AND PSYCHOLOGY 37

acting upon a mass of details, recognized as requiring the
same sort of treatment.1

The highest functions of thought are thus to be looked upon
as experimental; they never entirely lose that reference to
actual situations which shows their origin in the genetic proc
esses mentioned. Even the supposedly native or a priori
principles of knowledge are of the nature of postulates which
have proved useful in the organization of knowledge; a point
carried further in chapter iv below.

As to the actual origin of the different typical ' faculties'
of the older psychologists — perception, memory, imagination,
thought — we may look upon them as progressive variations
in mental endowment, each having its utility, and each in turn
fixed by selection. There is no difficulty in establishing the
enormous utility of each of these faculties, as has been inti
mated above. We may suppose residual processes left by
actual experiences serving in their day until established by
variation in the form of memory.2 The experimental use of
memory images, with corresponding success and utility,

1 Darwin is, indeed, right in saying that such habits of action are
the active equivalents of abstract ideas; but it is still true, I think,
that the dog acts spontaneously, not ' reflectively' — that is, he does
not judge the case to be such and such. The dog's 'abstract' or
4 general' is in a sense quasi-logical ('quasi-rational' in the old sense
of that term) or 'almost logical;' the fully logical requires a re
cognition of the different cases as similar and the judgment that
justifies common action upon them.

2 Personally to me this Darwinian way of looking at the origin
and function of memory is much more reasonable — in the present
state of the actual evidence at any rate — than the somewhat obscure
hypothesis of Hering (1870). taken up by Semon and Francis Dar
win, to the effect that memory is an original function of organized
matter, operating as between one generation and another to effect
the transmission of the effects of experience. See F. Darwin's Pres.
Address, Brit. Ass., Dublin, 1908; Science, Sept. 18 and 25, 1908;
and R. Semon, Die Mneme als erlialteiides Princip., etc. (1904).

38 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

would, be followed in time, by further variations, giving
imagination and thought. The series of functions of trial
and error, each in turn projecting its tentative schemes of
knowledge, would run ahead and be followed by 'coin
cident' variations, which would then remain fixed as a per
manent part of the mental endowment. The process of
evolution of psychic function, then, in its great morphological
stages, shows the same method — that of natural and organic
selection — found operative in organic evolution generally.

The opposed theory, represented by the very early and
theoretically complete exposition of Herbert Spencer's
Principles of Psychology, should also be recalled : the theory
which finds in the whole of mental as well as of organic prog
ress an exhibition of the accumulation of 'racial experiences'
solidified and transmitted by direct inheritance. To my
mind — and I speak principally as a psychologist — the weight
of present evidence, as well as that of theoretical probability,
is strongly on the side of the Darwinian interpretation, as
sketched above.

It may be noted in passing that, as will appear below, we
do not find any reason for excepting the 'rational' and
' spiritual' part of man from this account of human genesis,
in this agreeing with Darwin against Wallace. The higher
sentiments and the aspects of temperament called spiritual
dispositions are, so far as they are congenital, the emotional
accompaniments of the great stages of knowledge. A
generalized sentiment goes with a generalized thought. And
so far as these are not congenital, but acquired in each genera
tion, they belong to that great mass of socially transmitted
tradition which is the spiritual treasure of the race as a whole.

The analogy is carried farther toward mysticism by Haeckel, who
says, Darwin and Modern Science, quoting from his paper on
'Perigenesis' (1876): "Heredity is the memory of the plastidules
and variability their power of comprehension."

CHAPTER II.

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES.

The Social Sciences have their foundations deep in psychol
ogy. A department of the latter is called Social Psychology,
because of its recognition of the interaction of the two
human factors, the individual and the social group. In
Social Psychology and in Sociology the same set of phenom
ena are observed, but from the two points of view, respect
ively, of the individual's experiences and the experiences or
^activities of the group. Social Psychology asks what the de
velopment and life history of the individual's mind owe to its
social setting, to its place and role in a social order; sociology,
on the other hand, enquires into the traditions, customs, rites
and institutions — in general, into the organizations of all sorts
—in which the common social experiences of the individuals
are found to issue, when viewed collectively.

Various formulas have been suggested to bring out the
fundamental laws under which these two movements, individ
ual social development and racial social organization, have
taken place pari passu; and various attempts have been made
to state the different genetic stages in the concurrent prog
ress of the individual and society.1 In these attempts, it is
plain, the general questions of development and evolution
arise again on a different plane, and require solution in view
of the fact that in their nature the phenomena are not in a
strict sense biological, but psychological and social. For
admitting that the physical individual is subject to biolog-

1 An instance of this is cited below, in some detail, in the chap
ter on Religion (vi).

39

^

4<D DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

ical laws, it does not follow that the psychological and social
processes illustrate the same laws, nor even that the action of
the biological laws may not be in some way modified with the
entrance upon the field of the mental and social factors.

It is now widely held that certain of the attempts made to
apply biological principles directly to social life are crude and
fallacious. The attempt, for example, very current at one
time through the influence of Spencer1 to interpret social
organization by strict analogy with the physical organism, is
now discredited. Such a view will not stand before the con
sideration of the most elementary psychological principles.
Each of the modern theories which attempt to define the
fundamental method of social interaction among individuals
— identifying it with 'imitation,' 'constraint,' 'contract,'
'social suggestion,' etc. — each of these cites a psychological
process that has no direct counterpart or precise analogy in
the functions of the physical organism. To say that the
brain corresponds to the 'executive' function of government
is as grotesque, if used for more than an illustrative figure of
speech, as it is to say that the priests are the social ' parasites'
and the police the social 'phagocites.' Why not go over to
celestial physics and describe the sun as the ' executive officer'
of the planetary system ? Instead of stopping with the
identification of the veins and arteries with the system of
channels of economic distribution, why not go to geography
and cite the rivers and canals; and having gone so far reduce
economics to hydraulics ? Give rein to analogy and there is
no reason to stop with biology. The modes of action of
mind on mind, indeed, as seen in 'suggestion,' 'obedience,'
' imitation,' 'self-display,' 'rivalry' and 'social opposition,'
together with a host of other things that might be named at
random with equal right, entirely elude this very superificial
mode of pseudo-explanation.

1 H. Spencer, Principles of Sociology.

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 41

In order, however, to get more positive light on the
nature of society for the purpose of estimating Darwin's
influence in this great division of the humanities, let
us isolate certain of the problems which the biological and
social sciences do in fact have in common, and ask whether the
solution given by the biologists applies to the social and, if so,
with what modifications.

These great problems are, first, that of the material or
matter of social organization; second, that of the method of
social organization; and, third, that of transmission — the
problem of 'social progress.'

Social Matter. To the first of these questions the answer
in biology is clear enough. Biological matter consists of living
beings. Biology assumes the mode of organization called
'vital,' which is identified by certain marks and functional
processes characteristic of life. The organism furnishes the
material, and the further work of biology lies in the deter
mination of the methods of organization and transmission
characteristic of this sort of material. Biogenesis — the
origin of life from life — is its watchword. Biology cannot
deal with chemical and other a-biogenetic or merely 'bio-
nomic' processes, although these underly the vital and proceed
concurrently with it.

The social matter is not the same; it is not merely vital,
but something more. It is mental. This is shown by any
analysis of a social situation. Social ' fitness' is not measured
by physical characters, but by mental and moral characters.
We do not find that Mr. Howe's good looks had anything to
do with the invention or the social utility of his sewing machine,
nor that the success of the telephone was due to Bell's voice or
lungs. A great statesman may be blind, deaf, tall, short, or
bald. The social criteria of fitness are found on the side of
mental endowments — ability to judge clearly, to act wisely,

42 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

and to convince others; readiness to follow social precedents
and to submit to social restraint — all of them social characters
because, and only because, they are psychical.

To be convinced of this, we have only to look back upon
the evolution of mind and society together. There are indeed
certain very effective and complicated gregarious instincts,
which have arisen for their biological fitness and utility, and
are transmitted by physical heredity. But they are contrasted
somewhat sharply with the forms of human social organiza
tion. The former are fixed, stereotyped, relatively perfect and
relatively unchanging; they must be performed just so
or not at all. The ' animal company' has little development
and little flexibility, because its organization is rooted in
biological structure, But the gradual evolution of the
mammals, on the contrary, shows the continuous development,
as we have seen, of the plasticity which goes with mind, accom
panied by the breaking up of the biological type of organiza
tion and the extension of the psychological. The growth of
the mind allows the individuals to use their bodies in varied
and flexible ways for the purposes of intelligent cooperation
and mutual aid. As the physical type of organization decays,
the mental and social type at first spontaneous, and later
on reflective, advances.

It may be said, indeed, that the mind requires a brain, a
highly specialized organ with biological functions; and
this is true. But the function for which the brain itself, a
highly organized body, is specialized, is just the one that
releases many of the bodily organs from their biological
fixities and restricted utilities. By the use of the brain, the
organism becomes the instrument of mind; its various capaci
ties are applied to new and varied uses. The plasticity of
the brain and nerves is such that, with its increase, the intel
lectual and social utilities are increasingly served.

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 43

This gives, as I conceive it, a sort of selection and survival
which is quite different from that recognized in the strictly
biological sciences. We find that the utility to be subserved
is one of conscious cooperation and union among individuals;
and the unit whose selection is to secure this utility must
have the corresponding characters. This unit is not the!
individual, but a group of individuals who show in common
\their gregarious or social nature in actual exercise- each is
selected in company with certain others, who survive with him
and for the same reason. Thus the selective unit, considered
from the external or social point of view, is a group of individ-)
uals, greater or smaller as the utility subserved may require;
and from the point of view of the subjective or psychic process
it implies the mental attitude which brings the individual
into useful cooperation. Calling this latter the ' personal'
aspect of social fitness, we may define it by using the term
'socius.' The psychological unit is a 'socius,' a more or
less socialized individual, fitted to enter into fruitful social
relations. And the objective requirement remains that of a
group of such individuals making up a social situation.
These two conceptions become, then, the watchwords of our
evolutionary social psychology and sociology respectively-
the 'socius' and the ' social situation.'

The Socius. In the qualities of the socius or socialized
individual, we have the type of personal fitness upon which
the qualifications of the group for survival will depend. Only
so far as the individuals of a group are 'socii,' members cap
able of cooperation and willing to cooperate with their fellows,
will the group 'hold together' effectively, in competition with
other groups. The effect of further selection, therefore,
must be to fix the social characters of the individual, and,
through this effect, to perfect the organization within the
group, which will, in turn, fit the group as a whole to survive

44 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

in the competitions of group with group. This means that
there are now two spheres of selection, one that of 'intra-
group' selection, or ' social selection' proper, acting to socialize
the individuals within the group; the other that of 'inter-
group' selection, acting to preserve the most socialized group
in competition with other groups.

In the former of these, working as it does to develop the
'socius,' there is the gradual elimination of the more individ
ualistic characters, both physical and mental. The empha
sis has been placed more and more on physical plasticity,
with high brain endowment, and upon the corresponding
social educability, with imitativeness, docility and self-control.
Thus the average man has become a fairly socialized,
properly restrained, and competent member of the group.
Even the processes of social elimination and destruction are
handed over to the agents of society — the police, the courts,
and the hangman. In fact, so far are the processes of direct
physical competition superseded by the more intelligent, but,
from the physical point of view, less effective, social agencies,
that even the intermarriage of incompetents and diseased
persons is not only prevented; but these undesirable per
sons are artificially kept alive ! Only the one qualification
of fitness is insisted upon: the socius must live within the
bounds of established social usage and convention.

As to what the properly social processes of selection and
progress are, to that we are to return. Here it may suffice to
note that, by the operation of selection, resulting in the evolu
tion of plasticity and mind, the Darwinian factor of personal
competition on the basis oj_ egoistic and -'nclividiiqlistfc rhar-
[ acters has undergone essential modification. As a general
thing, in society we do not ngnt physically for our rights; on
the contrary, we appeal for their enforcement to the consti
tuted social agencies of the rights of all. And it is not for

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 45

individual and personal rights as such that we make the appeal,
but for the rights that are socially generalized and common.
But while the strictly Darwinian principle of struggle and
survival is thus revised within the group^ it still jernfljns
operative upon tke larger units, the "groups themselves.
< Group-struggle' takes the place of 'individual soru^gie^;1
ancT as we Will seeTJelow, the law 01 struggle or competi
tion takes on peculiar and interesting forms in the process
of social evolution itself.

The Social Situation. By this term we mean the more or

*

less effective organization within a group, which it brings to
1 the competition or struggle with other groups. In war, for
example, and in the competition of civilization with civiliza
tion, whatever forms that competition may take on, what
is necessary is not merely the fitness of individuals, butjfee^fit-
ness ate^f- the*typie QfJ solidarity'2 represented in their, spciaL
life. The poorly organized and more Individualistic groups go
to the wall before the more effectively organized and socialized.
The society that does not suppress its own criminals need not
expect to win the competitions of .race with race. Corrup
tion in_ administration means ineffectiveness in equipment.
This has now become a commonplace of social science. It
illustrates the transfer of the incidence of iitness and selection
from the individual to the group, from the individualistic to
the collatjvejjjg^g^jamibr. But at the same time, within
the group, the social forces as such are at work, selecting,
, educating, and refining the ' socius' of the group. ' Personal
cooperation' and 'group selection/ then, become the corner
stones' of the more critical and adequate social philosophy
which utilizes the Darwinian principle of selection. The
use of these conceptions has largely, and should completely,

1 Bagehot, Physics and Politics, emphasizes this point.
JOn Social 'Solidarity', see vol. xii of the Annales de V Institut
Int. de Sociologie (discussions by several writers, Paris, 1910).

46 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

supersede the application directly to society of vague and
superficial biological and physical analogies.1

Coming then to the second of our questions under this
general heading, we have to ask as to the methods of organiza
tion found respectively within and without the social group.
As to the latter, we have just seen that the group becomes
the unit of selection because it contains within it an effective
social situation, and that selection on the basis of the struggle
of group with group is its method. Waiving the further con
sideration of the latter aspect of the question of organization,
except indeed to note its strictly Darwinian character, we
may now enquire into the nature of the organization, within
the group itself, which fits it to survive.

The Social Self. Recalling the fact stated above that,
from the psychological point of view, it is the individual's sense
of his place in a social situation and his ability to fill his
place and perform his role in the situation that makes him a
socius and a valuable member of a group — recalling this, we
may describe social 'progress' as simply the advancing
organization due to the more and more conscious, deliberate
and effective participation of the individual in the current
social life. The individual must represent and seek to enforce
in his place and station the normal and conventional set of
established social values. He must be a self-controlled and
ready social instrument, whatever his part may be in the
work of the whole. All the institutional and pedagogical
agencies of society are exercised to the end of making each
member an informed and conforming social fellow or ' socius.'
Each man must absorb, by a long and wearisome course of
instruction and discipline, the social traditions of his race and
group.

1 Darwin, in his last edition, recognized Group Selection as
involving organization within the group. See Descent of Man, ed.
cit., p. 150. He had then read Bagehot's remarkable book, Physics
and Politics (1874), which he cites with admiration.

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 47

To this end the quasi-instinctive social tendencies of the
human child, such as bashfulness, love of display, imitation
and play, are of the first importance. It has been held with
vigor and force that if any one impulse is quite indispensable
to the training of social character it is that of imitation.
Apart from the attempt to construe the essential social process
in terms of imitation, narrowly understood, psychology has
now vastly extended the range of psychic processes which,
genetically considered, may be described as imitative in their
type; and we may say that imitation — understood to include
its products and derivatives as well as its mere method — is
the root of the socializing process.1 Both the individual's
essential learning of what is necessary to his social competence,
and also the propagation from one individual to another of
what all must know, with its discussion and generalization in
social institutions — all of these are kept in operation by
processes which are essentially imitative. In play, too,
broadly understood, we have, as has been imtimated above,
an engine of very great effectiveness. It is not to be confined
to the merely sportive or gaming tendencies, although in child
hood this has great social utility. But in the playful exercise
of the faculties of discussion, in make-believe, in mock co
operation, in playful competition, playful struggle and
rivalry of every sort, we have this great socializing factor
doing its proper work.2

1 Discussions of imitation in its social bearings are by Bagehot,
Physics and Politics; Tarde, The Laws of Imitation (Eng. Trans.);
Bosanquet, Phil. Theory of the State; Baldwin, Social and Ethical
Interpretations, 4ed. (which contains discussions of bashfulness and
self-exhibition); Royce, Studies in Good and Evil; W. McDougall,
Introduction to Social Psychology.

2 Bashfulness also passes from the instinctive stage into modesty,
shame, and sexual timidity and reserve; and in self-exhibition or dis
play many find one of the springs of art, coordinate with imitation
(cf . the writer's article, 'The Springs of Art,' Philosophical Review,
May, 1909.)

48 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

It all results in the development of a fit social self, by what
ever terms we may describe and name the subordinate men
tal processes that contribute to the result. The individual
grows to understand himself and his fellows in social terms.
We have quite given up the old abstraction of an anti-social
self, an individualistic and egoistic person, who was sup
posed to be always on the lookout for means of injuring his
fellows. On the contrary,- social psychology shows that the
' self of the individual's l self -consciousness' is, in its mate
rials and processes of formation, thoroughly social in its
origin. Each normally educated person is a 'socius,' born of
social life and coming, through his early education, directly
and naturally into his social heritage. His earliest judg
ments and his latest inventions are alike socially supported
and socially tried out. He succeeds, when he does, in mak
ing himself unsocial, only by a process of deliberate self-
seeking or by an equally artificial isolation, and even then
nature often gets the upper hand and shows him what a poor
and miserable individual he is capable of being when he seeks
to dwell alone. The naturally unsocial and anti-social
individuals are abnormal and exceptional cases.

The social individual, indeed, is the product of the social
life. He embodies and stands for the type of organization
which his group preserves in the struggle with other types.
The body of Frenchmen, for example, must be brought up as
Frenchmen, and the body of Englishmen as Englishmen, if
what is distinctive in these great civilizations is to be preserved.
And it is as much a part of the self-consciousness of each of
these, respectively, that he is a Frenchman or an English
man, as it is that he is personally A, the farmer, or B , the black
smith.

Social Transmission and Progress. It is, however, in
answer to the question of social progress and its method that

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 4Q

the social sciences find themselves obliged to make the most
far-reaching reservations in respect to the application of bio
logical principles to their material. For here we go over to the
realm of the psychological pure and simple, although biologi
cal laws are assumed to have established a relatively stable
basis for the characteristic operations of mind. The truth of
this is shown in the status of certain great problems which
are of such moment that when they are solved the more
detailed questions are also answered in principle.

In the two principles now firmly established, that of the
'social inheritance' of social matter, without physical trans
mission, on the one hand, and that of the psychological origin
and propagation of social variations in the form of inventive
ideas and original thoughts, on the other hand — with these
principles firmly rooted in the field of mental forces and
results, we care not what the biologist may say unto us. And
yet, when again, in this field, we have banished superficial
analogy and the cheap deductions of the man who is bent
on 'discounting' the mind, we find ourselves led to employ
conceptions which, if viewed as logical instruments and
philosophical principles, are those set store by in the works
of Darwin.

The fact of social transmission has, in recent literature, been
transformed from the mere commonplace of ordinary obser
vation to the careful statement of social law. It is fully recog
nized that psychological acquirements, the results of prac
tice in action and the acquisitions of knowledge, are embodied
in social regulations and conventions, and are not inherited
through the physiological organism. There is a process of
actual re-acquisition from generation to generation. This
does not, of course, involve actual re-discovery or the full
re-living of the experiences, since that would be too laborious
and haphazard. The function of society which is correlated

50 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

with the educability of the child comes in here: the function of
administering, again and again, in each generation, by the
agencies of instruction and discipline, the accumulated lore of
the ages gone by. It becomes necessary that each child who
is to run a good social race should be trained in the funda
mentals of social knowledge and instructed in the essentials
of social behavior. He must learn how to use the great social
instruments, language, writing, science. He grows to be a
'socius', in the sense above described, by the absorption of
the social tradition.

It thus appears that the great mass of essential social
matter escapes the limitations of physical heredity. It is
enough that by physical reproduction the fit candidate for
the social heritage be provided.

Social Change antlVariation. The other great requisite of
progress is, of course, some source of change, of social varia-
tjon^tp use the Darwinian term. As in social heredity we
have the conserving factor, whereby the stored acquisitions of
the race are re-administered to all and so remain in available
form, so here we must seek the principle of production of the
novelties through which advance is secured.

Here we are again on distinctly psychological ground. In
a sense, of course, the genius, the inventive thinker, is a
physical variation; he comes as a child of his parents, and of his
parents only. But there are two ways in which our theory of
the inventive thinker must supplement this biological account
of his origin. In the first place, the variations he represents
are variations in brain and mind. His heredity determines
them, for it is by marriage that his mental and physical
hereditary strains are alike brought into union; but given
the thinker, the babe intellectually well-born, the child of
fortune and of future greatness, and the battle is still but half
won. The social forces must now take him up and make him

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

socially productive. He must be trained in the matter and
methods of effective thought and action. He must be normal
in the main, if he is to become more than normal in his achieve
ments and contributions to the social store. For this is the
nature of the productive social variations. They are of the
nature of fruitful thoughts, proposals, measures suggested for
adoption by the social body. The mind of the great thinker
is, of course, the first requisite to each advance made by
society; but even his thoughts must be tempered by sane
judgment trained in the social conformities.1 And after all,
the main movement of progress comes by the smaller accre
tions, the modifications wrought out by the thinking minds
of lesser caliber than that of genius.

Indeed, we find reinstated here, in the world of ideas, a
curious form of struggle for existence, a competition of
ideas to survive. Kvery new thought, no matter how valu
able in the result, has to pass the gauntlet of social acceptance
no less than that of actual truth and availability. The indi
vidual 'particularizes' the new ideas; the common people of
the social group 'generalize' and apply them. Here, as
Bagehot said, the function of 'discussion' comes in. It is a
sort of meeting place of ideas, the theatre of competition
among thoughts and inventions, in which the fittest, the most
reasonable or plausible, survive in the custom, law, and prac
tice of society.2 The individual mind, then, is the source of
the new variations, the new items of mental production, which
are of possible availability; while society is the mental and
moral environment to which the new thoughts must show
their adaptation. In this sense there is a real application of
the Darwinian conception; but it is an intrinsic applica-

1 See appendix A, on 'Darwin's Judgment.'

2 Tarde uses the analogy of 'thinking* or logical process for this
fitting together or assimilation of ideas in the social whole; see his
work, La Logique sociale.

52 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

tion, operating in its own way under peculiar conditions; it is
not at all the taking over of a biological principle.

The essentially sui generis character of social transmission
and propagation of mental material in social progress suggests
another difference between its working and that of physical
heredity. It is evident that the extension of an idea in social
acceptance and belief is not limited to certain individuals, but
may run its course with any degree of celerity and complete
ness. A month, a week, a day may suffice for the general
recognition of a new thought in the social group. And this
process, instead of encountering limitations, is furthered
by certain psychological motives. Beliefs are contagious,
ideas run from mind to mind, imitation produces sameness
and conformity to the established. All these movements,
quite psychological in character, stand in contrast to the slow
processes by which biological characters become established.1
The latter must submit to the limitations and reductions of
reproduction by a single pair of parents, only the one pair and
possibly only the one parent at first showing the new variation.
Even in the most favorable biological case, that now called
' mutation' and known by the successors of Darwin2 as 'salta
tion/ in whi(;h a large or well-marked 'sport' variation
appears, the character in question must still be bred into the

1 Darwin says that a man by an act of sacrifice may through
the example he sets ' do far more good to his tribe than by begetting
offspring.' Descent of man, ed. cit., p. 149.

2 " Strongly marked deviations of structure, which occur only at
long intervals of time." Darwin, Descentof Man, p. 3. Galton's theory

of 'sports' recognized the same instances. See F. Galton, Natural
Inheritance. The authoritative exposition of the new theory of muta
tion is to be found in De Vries' The Mutation Theory; see also the
Darwin memorial volumes. Darwin, Origin, ed. cit., pp. 313 ff,,
anticipates it and urges strong objections to it. In my opinion, as an
account of the origin of species, even among plants, it is very far
from being proved.

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 53

race by actual reproduction under the limitations of the
laws of physical heredity.

It may be said again, of course, that this is a case of a bio
logical law applied to sociology — a variation propagating itself
because it is fit. Certainly; but the conditions and principles
of such propagation are so different and characteristic in the
two cases, that neither can be used for more than a
suggestive analogy to the other. What is common to the
two is the essential thought of Darwin's natural selection.
There is a selection under conditions of over-production
and this is 'natural,' the result following simply and entirely
from the conditions of the competition.

We have to conclude, then, that the Darwinian principle has
application in the sphere of social organization and progress.
But it is not because this principle is biological, nor is it opera
tive in its biological form. The truth is that Darwin struck
upon a law of such universal application in nature, in both
spheres, vital ancl mental, '"that we can apply it to much
that is' common to these two sciences. The differences
within what is common however extend to further details in
certain directions, and illustrate contrasts between the socio
logical and biological conceptions, notably in the matter of
'struggle for existence.' In the social sciences, this shows
itself -in, the various forms of competition and rivalry.

Struggle and Cojn petition. It is a remarkable fact that the
idea of 'struggle for existence,' an idea which supplies an
essential link in the chain of the Darwinian theory, was
suggested to him by Malthus' book on population. Wal
lace was influenced by Malthus in much the same way.1

Malthus' suggestive and fruitful thought was in effect this

1 The ever-memorable 'Essay on the Principle of Population,'
Darwin, Descent of Man, ed. cit., p. 50. Wallace has himself
described the way in which Malthus supplied to him "the long-
sought clue to the effective agent in the evolution of organic species,"
in his My Life, A Record of Events and Opinions, i, pp, 232, 361.

54 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

without some eliminating agency, said he, — some ' Malthusian
factor' as it has since been called — over-population would be
produced and this would result in scarcity of food, the pro
duction not keeping up with the increased demand. Over
population would then result in a struggle for the means
of life. Malthus pointed out various ' checks' on population
by which this is prevented. Taken literally, of course, the
simplest case of this would be in the animal world, where
simple appetite would impel the individuals to contend with
one another whenever food was not abundant. Darwin saw
that this was realized in animal nature. The animals are not
only constantly fighting for their food, but they are equipped
with weapons of offense and defense, seemingly provided
for this express purpose. And the idea is near at hand, as the
case of Darwin and Wallace both demonstrate, that it is
through such a 'struggle' that the fittest survive, and that
the relatively well defended and strong have been evolved.

This we may consider as the strictly ' Darwinian' sort of
struggle for existence; for although suggested by an economist,
it is nevertheless this form of competition that finds its evident
application in the relatively simple biological conditions
assumed by Darwin, where the psychological factors as such
do not play a conspicuous part. This we may call, under
stood literally, ' struggle for food' or struggle for sustenance —
struggle, that is, for the means of life. "

When we come, however, to broaden our outlook and to
examine the examples actually given by the two great apostles
of natural selection themselves, we find. certain variations
from this simple condition of struggle for food. Food is not
all that the mere animal wants. Darwin recognized that the
other great instincts and appetites also lead to struggle forTEeir
satisfaction. In his emp!iasTs~bn SexuaTSelection lie"recog-
mzcd the force and critical character of the reproductive

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 55

instinct which leads to the struggle of the males for females.1
Even the struggle for food takes on a complicated character
when we recognize that the ' food' in question may be another
animal; for the prey must 'put up' the most intense sort of
struggle to escape. It is not struggle for food to him, but
struggle to escape being made into food ! It is a struggle for
life with him. Indeed we find a great class of characters in
nature that serve just this end, characters of defense, of con
cealment, of rapid locomotion, of cunning and make-believe,
all providing for escape, in this form or that. Under this
heading, too, we must place the struggle not against other
animals, other living enemies, but against nature itself—
against rigorous climate, and disease — against all the forces
of the environment to which any relative maladjustment
would terminate fatally. This is a l struggle to live,'2

Both these cases of struggle for existence — 'struggle for
food' and ' struggle to live' — are illustrated in the more com
plex conditions with which the social sciences have to deal.
Every individual who has to make his living, whether with his
hands or with his brain, or with both together, is having a
struggle for food. And in our fight against cold, climate and
disease, we are also struggling to live. Indeed, about the
only form of danger leading to struggle for existence, in this

1 Although announced in the Origin of Species, the principle of
Sexual Selection received more detailed treatment and greater
emphasis in the Descent of Man, the full title of which is The
Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. The principle of
Sexual Selection is coming into juster recognition as accounting for
the 'secondary' sexual character. See Weismann, in Darwin and
Modern Science, pp. 42 ff.

2 Darwin discusses the human struggle for existence with
reference to the Malthusian 'checks on population,' in Descent of
Man, ed. cit., pp. 50 ff. In the Origin of Species, ed. cit., vol. i,
p. 78, he clearly distinguishes the two forms of struggle mentioned
in the text.

56 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

individualistic sense, that the modern human individual
escapes is that of being eaten up by his fellow-man. Canni
balism is done away with, at least in good society. But there
are mosquitoes and parasites still to feed upon us; and in the
most cultivated circles we run risks of having our substance
devoured even though our persons be safe.

We may say, on the whole, that the cruder forms of struggle
for existence in the biological sense, the forms that depend
upon physical offense and defense, are largely done away
with when we come to the stage of active social cooperation.
In rude societies, it survives in the indulgence of the coarser
emotions and passions which are not yet reduced to the form
in which they serve social use rather than private gratifica
tions. Private revenge, for example, and lynch law remain
in some communities. Some forms of direct struggle survive
too on account of the countenance they continue to have in
actual social sanction, during the slow processes of the evolu
tion of the agencies of social control and law. But coopera
tion within the group is really the final enemy to these sorts
of individualism; and we find that it is outside the group, in
the realm of inter-group selection, that the struggle remains
one of direct life-and-death competition. War we still have
with us, and also the protective tariff, the exclusion of aliens
from our food and labor markets, etc., all devices for provid
ing for our own people regardless of what effect this may have
upon other people who are in fact just as human and just
as hungry as we are.

It is fair to say, therefore, that there is a progressive sup
pression within the group of the grosser, more biological forms
of struggle for existence, progressing with the advance in
social cooperation and organization; but that they still find
illustration in the struggle which a social group as a unit
wages with other similar units or groups. Even here, how-

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 57

ever, the struggle tends to be waged with other than physical
weapons. The growth of mind, making the group organiza
tion ever more effective, shows itself efficient also in the foreign
relations of the group. War and all other sorts of racial
rivalry become as much struggle of wits as struggle with
hands and guns. In war the sting of defeat is not measured
by numerical loss of men, but by the humiliation of national
pride and the loss of racial prestige. The costliness of
victory contributes to the pride and glory of its achievement.

These considerations may introduce us to the form of
struggle for existence which is distinctly psychological in
i character, and which does not allow of any sort of biological
explanation. Let us call this ' rivalry,' including in it all
forms of competition, both individual and social, in which
psychological factors play the essential role.

Rivalry. The test of rivalry, so denned, is to be found in
' its motive and end. In biological struggle we have either the
end of personal existence, ministered to by appetite, passion,
and self-defense, or that of racial continuance, the end of
physical reproduction. Biological cooperations, even, when
strictly interpreted, have one or both of these ends. In
dividual animals live to propagate, and the species prop
agates to live. This is the circle of biological ends. The
male bird does not understand the motive of his courtship
antics, but the end is there just the same; the female may not
know why she builds the nest, but she is conforming to racial
ends. The immediate gratification of impulse and instinct
forwards the biological process.

But when we come to psychological, social and moral
rivalry these things are not so. In a word, social utility tends
to replace that of instinct: a statement which our own
detailed explanation will justify. We say to a man: ' You
are, of course, an animal, but do not allow yourself to be

58 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

one.1 We enter here upon a world of what we may call
1 mental and moral motives and ends,' which are not exhausted
in those of the biological order.

If we proceed to ask in what respects the social person
comes into rivalry with his fellows, we find all sorts of situa
tions which can be described only in psychological terms.
He acts from motives of display, advancement, prestige,
reputation, gain, happiness, honor, all terms which represent
a sort of end that cannot be identified with mere continuance
or propagation of physical life. Even the most directly
egoistic and utilitarian conduct by which one may compete
with his fellows, is partly motived by social considerations.
The merchant seeks wealth not for mere food or mere life,
but for family prestige and for the larger social amenities.
The banker gives a fine dinner not to gratify his appetite or
that of his guests, but to show forth 'his own glory,' a motive
of such dignity that it was attributed to the Creator by the
Westminster divines. Rivalry, then, as varied as its motive
may be, is, negatively at least, so to be described: it is not
exhausted by the biological struggle for existence, understood
either in individual or in gregarious terms.

This appears, also, when we consider the sort of environ
ment in which personal and social rivalry is fought out. It
is not a contest to show physical fitness, to effect adaptation to
physical conditions, or to meet physical tests. It is rather
aimed to meet the conditions of social and moral utility. It is
the environment of society itself, not that of the physical
earth and its forces, for which the successful rival must show
his relative fitness. He must convince men, persuade women,
forecast demand, provide supply, anticipate economic and
industrial movements, discount beliefs, and weigh customs.
This is the arena of social rivalries and advancements. The
contest turns upon the individual's personal adjustment to

DARWINISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES 59

social situations, upon his attitude toward social institutions
and his will to acknowledge them, not upon his place or
function in the scale of physical life.

Not stopping to dwell upon details, we may consider this
as the essential difference between the two cases. Within the
group, the rivalries are those which presuppose a social and
moral order, and require motives in the individual to meet the
demands of such an order. And within this order itself are
to be found the criteria of fitness and selection, with the cor
responding means of elimination, of the socially and morally
unfit. For there is here also something corresponding to the
elimination found in the biological order; there is a social -
suppression of the socially unfit. For this, society develops
weapons to use against itsownmembers. In social ostracism,
the boycott, the jail, the reformatory, the asylum and the
gallows, we have society's means of suppression or elimination.
But this is again different from biological elimination, just
as a conscious, deliberate motive differs from a blind biological
impulse. We do not kill off the criminals or the insane indis
criminately in a fit of rage, simply because we are able to do
so or feel so disposed; but we deliberately hang or confine
them because we judge them, together with their activities and
tendencies, to be injurious to society. It is not an automatic
elimination, the outcome of mere struggle as in biology; it is,
on the contrary, a conscious process of banishing the socially
unfit. 1 The new science ofEugenics,. having as god-father one
of the verteran Darwinians of England, Sir Francis Galton, is jj A
founded upon the possibility of carrying further in a sys
tematic way this intentional improvement of the race, by the

*It is true also, as Lloyd Morgan has pointed out, that individ
ual conscious selection seeks positively the best, instead of merely
neglecting the worst; but individual choice is so variable that this
seems to be a very uncertain factor.

60 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

'artificial' selection or elimination of individuals who are
respectively fit or unfit, either physically or socially. It in
volves the direct application to human life of Darwin's
'methodical' selection — the systematic selection by man with
an end in view.

In this matter of rivalry in general, then, we find the main
Darwinian method of selection and progress again exempli
fied, but not in a way tha,t simply applies the biological princi
ple to social facts. On the contrary, the principle is widened.
It finds different, though analogous, application in these two
great fields of knowledge. Biological struggle is the means of
selection for purposes of life in a physical and vital environ
ment; its conditions are those of the organic order; its quali
fications those of physical fitness. Social rivalry, on the
other hand, is the means of selection for mental and moral
purposes, personal, economic, etc., in the environment of a
social order; its qualifications are social and moral.1

I have used the word ' moral' above in a general sense, seem
ing to slur its distinctive import and to identify it entirely with
the social. We have found a world, an environment, of
physical facts and values, requiring a certain sort of fitness,
and also a world or environment of social facts and values;
how far, and in what sense, we may now ask, do these exhaust
what is known distinctively as the world of ' moral' or ' ethical'
facts and values ?

1 Similar reservations in respect to the use of the biological
analogy in literary science are made in the valuable papers of
Prof. J. P. Hoskins in Modern Philology, April and July, 1909.

Below, in this paper, p. 74 ff, under 'Community,' a further
word is said on the bearing of the selection theory on the sciences of
politics and government. Darwin sums up his views on social prog
ress as follows (Descent of Man, ed. cit. p. 162) : "The more efficient
causes of progress seem to consist of a good education during youth,
while the brain is impressible, and of a high standard of excellence
inculcated by the ablest and best men, embodied in the laws, cus
toms, and traditions of the nation, and enforced by public opinion."

CHAPTER III.

DARWINISM AND ETHICS.

The name of Huxley comes to mind as we approach this
topic. The controversy excited by his Romanes lecture,
entitled Evolution and Ethics, will be recalled by many of
my readers. One of the champions of Darwinism here
deserted the colors, for Huxley held that in our ' moral sense'
we have a principle of altruism and a rule of conduct that
directly contravene the principle of 'struggle for existence;'
morality could not have had its origin, said he, in the working
of this principle, considered as issuing in the survival of the
fittest.

We are now prepared, however, to find that Huxley was
wrong.

Huxley did not appreciate the fact that there are stages of
transition between biological struggle and social rivalry,
between the physical fitness required for the one and the social
fitness required for the other. So soon as we see that the
fitness of the group for its struggle requires organization within
the group, and this in turn requires a socialized rather than an
egoistic individual, then the difficulty disappears. Utility for
the group presupposes self-control and altruism in the individual.
It is the extension of the application of natural selection to
groups, rather than its direct application to individuals, that
has given birth to morals. So the Darwinian principle is

1 Prof. Tufts discusses this topic in the Darwin Number of the
Psychological Review, May, 1909.

Darwin's views on the origin of morals are to be found in
ch. iv of the Descent of Man. See his brief resume on pp. 149 to
150 (ed. cit.)

61

62 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

preserved.1 The theater of competitions is the social order,

not the physical environment; and the interests of that order

y . I are the first and essential utilities. Morality has arisen

/ ' because it is socially useful] that is the Darwinian account. An

/ intelligent altruism is a better type of life for social purposes

than a stark egoism; and the better type has prevailed and

will prevail.

To this result several steps are found necessary; and these
we may now take, using, as in the earlier sections, the catch
words of current theory: Social Control, Self -Restraint, Altru
ism, Duty.

Social Control. The preservation of a group depends upon
the character of its inner organization. This requires, in the
interest of the whole, the subordination and regulation of
the individuals. Such regulation is what is called 'social
control.' It is the control of society over its members by
all its agencies, executive, educational, penal, etc. It
extends to all the social arrangements: to custom, tradition,
law, with their sanctions — legal, conventional, pedagogical-
exercised for the constraint of the individuals and the sup
pression of the capricious and anti-social. The constabu
lary is the instrument of social control on the lower plane, the
judiciary on the higher.

Self-restraint. The progress of society, however, is not lim
ited to the merely external or repressive modes of enforcement
which the exercise of direct social control alone would create;

1 It is really astonishing that Huxley did not see this, for
Darwin's own exposition is fundamentally based upon this dis
tinction. He heads his collection of cases (pp. 132 f ) with the
legend, 'The Strictly Social Virtues at First alone Regarded;' and
in the discussion we find these words: "Actions are regarded
by savages . as good or bad solely as they affect the welfare
of the tribe — not that of the species, nor that of an individual"
(P- 135).

DARWINISM AND ETHICS 63

nor is this adequate to produce morality. There is the corre
lated process of development, in the individual, of personal
control or self-restraint. It is due, we have seen, to the social
character of personal development as such. Each person is
educated to be a ' socius,' self -trained in the duties and obli
gations, as well as in the rights and privileges, attaching to the
essential social situations of life. This sort, of training is
reflected in the kind of sanity of social judgment which we
call 'practical' or 'moral.' It requires the voluntary subordina
tion of the individualistic to the common interest. It is not
a distinct faculty; it is simply the sense of social fitness and
value become habitual, natural and obligatory to the individ
ual. It represents, on the whole, the socially useful: the type
of conduct which has behind it the enforced sanctions of the
social discipline and control of the race. The child's 'self,'
being socially molded, is a self whose normal practice should
issue in socially established channels: and this 'should'
becomes, when self-legislating in the individual, his ethical
'ought.'

Apart from points of further philosophical discussion, we
may accept this answer to the question of the genesis and
meaning in evolution of the individual's conscience. It is a
form of self-restraint and self-direction which follows upon
and in turn enforces outwardly sanctioned social constraint
and direction. It is the normal personal self coming into its
social heritage of rights and duties and recognizing its place
and status. Its ideal is personal consistency and self-direc
tion; but its discipline and guidance are social and its rules
are those produced and sanctioned by social utility. The
moral geniusjikc the invgntive^EQJus, produces variations—
in~this case i dear looking toward prac^ic^j^fonn^ and
chalige^-but these are selected, in turn, forthe-ir social fitness
and value.

*•»-. JLjQA, **i * W

64 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

This account of morals is, of course, Darwinian in spirit.1
It shows the moral faculty to be genetically due to the reflec
tion and grounding, in a socially developed self or person, of
the rules of organization found fit in social life under condi
tions of group competition.

Altruism. The stumbling-block to Huxley was the altru
ism of the moral life. How can consideration of others super
sede self-seeking, if a struggle for individual existence — an
'eye for an eye', a 'tooth and claw' struggle — is the rule or
law of survival? But we now see that the biological and
individualistic sort of struggle does not represent the method"
of social selection. Struggle to Hbe1 oT to b"ec6me ""'effective
and successful units or socii in an organization of self-con
trolled individuals — that is the proper form of statement.
This involves the voluntary cooperation of individuals in the
social situation. So all the egoistic and self-seeking impulses

1 I have elsewhere stated what I believe to be the lack in Darwin's
theory, as expounded in chap, iv of the Descent of Man. He
finds morality too early, genetically, I think, taking its roots (social
instinct, sympathy, etc.) for the thing itself, and not recognizing
sufficiently the higher elements of self-determination and reflective
j udgment which develop naturally out of these roots. I think it is the
reflective determination of alternatives of conduct that distinguishes
a man's 'conscientiousness,' to use Darwin's term, from the dog's.

We should hardly expect Darwin to wo'rk out distinctions which
the professed psychologist and moralist find it necessary to develop.
Yet in such passages as the following the true note seems to be
struck. He says (loc. cit., p. 126): "A moral being is one who
is capable of comparing his past and future actions, and of approv
ing or disapproving of them." It is the ' approving ' and 'disap
proving,' of which we wish a fuller account.

Cf. the writer's Social and Ethical Interpretations, Chap, ii; and
see Tufts on 'Darwin and Evolutionary Ethics,' in the Darwin
Number, May, 1909, of the Psychological Review. Other works on
evolution ethics are Schurman's The Ethical Import of Darwinism,
and (of especial value) Alexander's Moral Order and Progress. The
social grounding of ethics is ably advocated in L. Stephens' The
Science of Ethics.

DARWINISM AND ETHICS 65

and propensities must be inhibited in the adjustments of

justice, fraternity, and right. It is the person as such, the

socialized self, upon whom the fittest conduct must terminate

and in whom it must originate, whether, in this case or itnat,

it be embodied in one's own interests or in the interests of

others. Sympathy and altruism are the socialized and trans-

I formed impulses of the growing individual, who is educated

1 into a higher selfhood; egoism and self-love must undergo

"this transformation.

• Duty. Duty is the sense of this requirement, as one's own
socially built-up nature utters it. It is my duty to be con
sciously a social instrument — the representative of the socially
best — the most fit person I can be; and since this is reflected in
my conscience it is my duty in general to obey my conscience.
But with this must go my best insight, my most informed
reflection. From the point of view of society, altruism in
spirit is always useful; but it is not always duty. Reflective
judgment and deliberate foresight for the good of the whole-
nothing short of this is one's duty.

It is not my intention to develop ethical theory here; but to
show in what way Darwin's general point of view works up
into ethics_through sociolo^ Once granted the origin of
society by selective processes, with standards of group-utility
replacing those of biological and individual utility, and the
objection to Darwinism in ethics, on the ground of its individ
ualism, completely disappears. The norms of social utility
become the ideals of personal duty, which are unconditionally
imperative to the individual.1

We may either stop here with so much justification for the
utilitarianism of Mill and Stephen and the positivism of
Comte; or go on to the ethical idealism of Kant, whose

'As we will see below, p. 70, the logical 'necessity' of truth
like the moral 'necessity' of duty, is socially established.

66 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

maxim, ' Act so that the rule of thy conduct may be fit for
universal law,' only reverses the process as sketched in the
passage above.1 The Kantian says in effect : " Society absorbs
and utilizes the individual's ideals of absolute duty"; the Dar
winian says: "Society produces the individual, and informs
him in what thus becomes for him his absolute duty.'1 In
either case, the duty of the individual is absolute in the
sense that, having a sense of duty, he must follow its guidance.
From the point of view of science, however, new possibili
ties of fruitful investigation appear. It is evident that the
genetic or developmental method may be applied fruitfully to
the moral, whether it be considered as evolving in the social
life of the race, or as developing in the moral sense of the
individual. Objective or social ethics becomes a department
of anthropology. It is the science of the actual rise and
evolution of morals in races and peoples, and ranks with
other comparative sciences of human institutions. The devel
opment of the moral nature of the individual is also opened
to scientific investigation in connection with that of his social
nature. In both these directions the natural history of
morals — and also that of religion — is being made out.2 They
both proceed, however, it is clear, upon the assumption that
morality as such is natural and social, and has its develop
mental stages of progression both in the individual and in the
race. As a distinctive mental function, its evolution takes
place in connection with the history and development of
man. I have therefore elsewhere described it as 'anthropo-

1 "Act always on such a maxim as thou kanst at the same time
will to be a universal law", Kant, Metaph. of Morals, Abbott's trans.

2 Recent books dealing respectively with these two sorts of
enquiry may be mentioned: Ethics, by Dewey and Tufts, and The
Moral Life, by A. E. Davies (Review Publishing Co., Baltimore,
1909). Westermarck's Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas
also falls within the first-named branch of enquiry.

DARWINISM AND ETHICS 67

genetic' in the one case, and in the other case, as shown in
the parallel development of the individual's moral sense, as
'psycho-genetic,' both of these terms being opposed to
what may, as merely vital or biological, be described as
'bio-genetic.'1

1 Cf. Social and Ethical Interpretations, 4 ed., 'Introduction';
and Chapter vi, below, on 'Darwinism and Religion'. See also the
work of Davies, cited in the last note.

CHAPTER IV

DARWINISM AND LOGIC
I.

Under the headings of 'instrumental' and 'genetic' logic1
the evolution theory has worked its way into the discussion of
the higher processes of thought. The theory that thought is
an instrument for dealing with social and practical situations
— for solving problems of adjustment and truth — has given
to discussions of knowledge and reality a new and vital
interest. All knowledge remains experimental until it is
confirmed, and it can be confirmed only by a resort to trial in
the domain of its appropriate application. This leads up to
two very important positions in the newer logic : a view as to
the nature of truth on the one hand, and a view on the other
hand as to the nature of the 'laws of thought,' the so-called
'categories' in which the mind builds up and systematizes
its acquisitions.

The theory of truth becomes either one of extreme ' Prag
matism' or one merely of 'Instrumentalism.'

Instrumentalism holds that all truth is tentatively arrived at
and experimentally verified. The method of knowledge is the

1 See Dewey, Studies in Logical Theory, and Baldwin, Thought
and Things or Genetic Logic, two works generally cited as exemplify
ing the Darwinian influence (cf. Creighton on ' Darwin and Logic' in
the Psychological Review, Darwin number, May, 1909, in which this
and the following chapter of this essay have also appeared in incom
plete form.) R. Adamson, in his work on The Development of
Modern Philosophy, also discusses knowledge from the point of
view of genesis. See also Appendix B.

68

DARWINISM AND LOGIC 60

now familiar Darwinian procedure of 'trial and error.' The
thinker, whether working in the laboratory with things or
among the products of his own imaginative thought, tries out
i hypotheses] and only by trying out hypotheses does he estab
lish truth. The knowledge already possessed is used instru
mentally' in the form of a hypothesis or conjecture, for the
discovery of further facts or truths. This reinstates in the
sphere of thinking the method of Darwinian selection.

Here Darwinism gives support to the empiricism of Hume
and Mill and forwards the sober British philosophical tradi
tion. And no one illustrates better than Darwin, in his own
scientific method, the soberness, caution, and soundness of
this procedure.1

Scientific method becomes, when the full implications of
the matter are thought out, the exhaustive epistemological
method; that is, we must hold that there is no method of
» reaching results to be called truths which is not found, when
genetically considered, to go back to the fundamental pro
cesses of experimentation. There is no royal road to truth;
no golden rule of revelation or inspiration by which the phil
osopher can deduce the 'universe and the contents thereof.'
The ambitious Natur philosophic of the last century remained
barren and speculative until, through the development of
experimental and evolutionary science, it became Naturwis-
senschaft.

But what shall we say of the principles of knowledge itself ?
Are there no final a priori and absolute tests of truth such as
we are accustomed to find in 'identity,' 'consistency,' and
'sufficient reason'? Are there no constructive categories
which do not themselves owe their establishment to experi
ment?

As for the categories — here again instrumentalism has its

1 See Appendix A.

70 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

adequate reply; and its reply is strictly Darwinian. These,
too, it claims, the categories, are principles which have been
selected from numberless possible variations of thought in the
course of racial evolution. They represent selections, adjust
ments to the natural situations which have confronted the
mind. They are rules of systematization found useful for
thought and experience, for individual knowledge and prac
tice, and for common social belief in the vast stretches of his
tory. The mind has built up a structure, as the body has;
and by a similar method: that of tentative and experimental
functional adjustment, followed up by the coincident varia
tions of mental structure fixed by selection.

It is here that Herbert Spencer's most valuable intuition
appears — a conception to be placed beside that of Darwin.
The weak point in Spencer's harness, however, was his resort
to Lamarckian inheritance for the fixing of the rib-structures
of mind. But for the theory of knowledge, the result is the
same. The most absolute and universal-seeming principles
of knowledge, viewed racially, are 'practical postulates'
which have been woven into human thought as presupposi
tions of consistent and trustworthy experience. They were
'original ideas' at some time, found to be useful for the organi
zation of knowledge and for the conduct of life; and, now, by
processes of reflective abstraction, they are set up as schemes
or forms divorced from the concrete contents which alone gave
them their justification and value, and called 'the categories.'

All knowledge, all thought, must conform to the law of
consistency because this has become the fixed rule of safe
and profitable experience.

So far we may recognize the two great conquests of the

instrumental or experimental logic. It holds that all truth is

j confirmed hypothesis, and that 'reason' is truth woven into

mental structure. These two great formulations are handed

DARWINISM AND LOGIC 7 1

over to philosophy. Both arc Darwinian. The first cites

r j

the selection of ideas for their utility in personal and social
development; the second cites the 'coincident' racial selection
that fixes them in the constitution of the mind.1

But a more radical point of view is possible. What is now
known as Pragmatism proceeds out from this point. It is
pertinent to notice it here, for it offers a link of transition to
the philosophical views with which we must briefly concern
ourselves.

Pragmatism? turns instrumentalism into a system of
metaphysics. It claims that apart from its tentative instru
mental value, its value as guide to life, its value as measured
by utility, seen in the consequences of its following out, truth
has no further meaning. Not only is all truth selected for
its utility, but apart from its utility it is not truth. There is
no reality then to which truth is still true, whether humanly
discovered or not; on the contrary, reality is only the content
of the system of beliefs found useful as a guide to life.

I wish to point out that, in such a conclusion, not only is the
experimental conception left behind, but the advantages of the
Darwinian principle of adjustment to actual situations, physi-

1 In the work Thought and Things, vol. ii, chaps, iii and xi, the writer
has published detailed discussions of the psychological processes by
which practical and social postulates become, in the organization
of the individual's thought, universal and rational principles. In
vol. iii of the same work, this position is developed into a genetic
theory of 'Intuition,' both rational and practical. On the biological
side, so far as such principles have become hereditary and innate,
the two possible explanations are those of 'race experience'
(Lamarckian) and 'organic selection' (Darwinian).

2 The authoritative expositions are James' Pragmatism and
Dewey's Studies in Logical Theory. I do not hold these authors,
however, to the statements made in my text in exposition of this
chameleon-like theory. A detailed criticism is to be found in the
article 'The Limits of Pragmatism,' in the Psychological Review, vol.
xi, 1904, pp. 30 ff.

72 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

cal and social, is lost; and if so interpreted, instrumentalism
defeats itself. This clearly appears when we analyze a situa
tion involving trial and error. Trial implies a problematical
and alternative result: either the success of the assumption
put to trial or its failure. When we ask why this is so, we
hit upon the presence of some l controlling' condition or cir
cumstance in the situation — some stable physical or social fact
—whose character renders the hypothesis or suggested solution
either adequate or vain, as the case may be. The instru
mental idea or thought, then, has its merit in enabling us to
find out or locate facts and conditions which are to be
allowed for thereafter. These constitute a control upon knowl
edge and action, a system of 'things'. Now we may, indeed,
say that nothing of what we think can be considered real
except what has been experimentally discovered; but we
cannot go on to say that it is the discovery that makes it real.
For if that were true, what account could we give of this
painstaking and often most laborious process of gradual
correction and proof? — what account, that is, of the 'control'
exercised upon knowledge and action by facts or things?

I know there are ways of replying to this criticism — ways
of reducing the environment and its controlling facts to the
level of postulates of earlier personal or racial experience.
But while not finding these replies sufficient,1 1 may simply say
— confining the discussion to the Darwinian text — that the
method of selection by trial and error requires that relative
stability, fixity and permanence be discovered in the 'control'
conditions in the environment, since the genesis of truth

1 For the reason that, when knowledge is reduced to the simplest
terms, there is, for experience itself an unreduced something, which
it takes to be in some sense 'foreign' to itself. To overlook this
something, is simply and arbitrarily to abolish the dualistic pre
sumption of knowledge, and so to make impossible any account of
its genesis and development.

DARWINISM AND LOGIC 73

lies in the checking off of hypotheses under this more
stable control. The truth of a thought may be discovered
through its successful working; but we have to consider
also the failures, the errors, and indeed the whole situation
in which truth and error are alike possible.

Such analysis supports instrumentalism, but it does
not support pragmatism. I may 'bring about' reality
perhaps, without this external control, by ' willing to believe'
in something for which I have no proof or reason, in cases in
which the sort of event willed — as, for example, some one else's
conduct — may be conditioned upon my act of will. But
nature does not take to suggestions so kindly. The will of a
general may stimulate his troops and so bring to him the
victory he believes in; but such an act of the general's will
cannot replenish the short supply of powder or shells, on
which the issue of the battle perhaps more fundamentally
depends.

In one other respect the newer view is transforming the
theory of knowledge, a respect in which it shares with political
and social science the impulse of Darwinism. I refer to the
point of view from which the unit of knowledge, as of practice,
is no longer to be found in an isolated and self-regulating
individual. Covering both the logical and the political
aspects of the topic by the single term 'Community,' I may
discuss it under that heading. In social and political science
it is community of interests; in logic it is community of
judgments or beliefs.

Community.^ Work in social psychology has greatly

1 The two sorts of ' community' indicated in what follows are
worked out by the present writer in detail elsewhere; that of the
social life in Social and Ethical Interpretations (4th ed., 1906), and
that of knowledge in Thought and Things, vol. ii.

74 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

modified the notion of the individual. The individual is
found to be a social product, a complex result, having its genetic
conditions in actual social life. Individuals act together, not
alone — collectively, not singly. In short, the selective
processes which have molded the individual, both racially and
in his personal development, have turned on collective utilities.

When interpreted in the political sciences this discovery
shatters, at one blow, the historical theories of individualism,
which make such motives as personal contract, individual
competition, etc., the fundamental springs of human conduct,
in its social relations, and the sources of government. Instead
of a social contract, there is a social growth; the only contract
is the one-sided one that assigns the too individualistic
thinker or actor to the jail or the asylum. Instead of govern
ment 'only with the consent of the governed,' we find
government by the few or by the many with or without the
consent of the rest. In this, and in the more 'socialized'
view of human competition and rivalry, and in the new view of
social transmission considered as a process which largely
replaces physical heredity, both in its content and in its
method, we find summed up the enormous debt that political
science, together with the other social sciences, owes to
researches carried out in the spirit of the selection theory.
Community of interests is a fundamental fact resting on the
conditions of the rise of community life.

In the theory of knowledge the same general truth appears,
and it is for this reason that I place the two cases together.
In the social sciences and in the theory of knowledge alike
' community' or some equivalent term, used to denote that
character which is the opposite of individualism and
atomism, is henceforth to be one of the watchwords. In
the theory of knowledge it appears in the social reference that
all knowledge implies.

DARWINISM AND LOGIC 75

For psychologists and logicians the problem now is to find
any knowledge that is psychologically private, not to find
knowledge that is common and public. Individual judgment
and sentiment are everywhere rooted in social life — through
education, tradition, convention — and it becomes a problem
of knowledge, as of ethics, to show how it is possible for
anyone to 'be a Daniel,' 'to stand alone.' The result is that
the subjectivistic theories of knowledge, like the individual-
i istic theories of political science, are soon to be laid away in
the attics where old intellectual furniture is stored. The
knower does not start out in isolation and then come to some
sort of agreement with others by ' matching ' his world of
independent sensations and cognitions with theirs. On the
contrary, he starts with what his and his neighbor's experiences
in common verify; and only partially and by degrees does he
find himself and prove himself to be a relatively competent
independent thinker. The theory of the 'communities' or
common validities of knowledge, and of the corresponding
'communities or common interests of members of society, is a
new possession, due largely to the genetic researches which
the Darwinian spirit and method have inspired.

"The individual", I have said in effect elsewhere1 "is the
result of refined processes of social differentiation. If he

1 Thought and Things, vol. ii, chap, iii, sect. 75.

I may be allowed to quote also the following passage, sum
marizing the results of longer discussions, from the article ' Knowl
edge and Imagination,' the Psychological Review, May, 1908
(somewhat altered) : " Knowledge is essentially and fundamentally
common or social, not private. The sentence 'the individual is a
social outcome, not a social unit' hits off this result. The same aspect
of logical community might be hit off in the sentence ' knowledge
is common property, not a private possession.' As the former of
these sentences states the truth that is, in my opinion, finally to
refute individualism in social theory, so the latter supplies the anal
ogous refutation of individualism in the world of truth. The ques-

7 6 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

makes himself a social unit over against society, he becomes
eccentric and anti-social, and his damnation is sure. So of
knowledge. It begins common, stays common, claims to be
common, enforces its commonness. No knowledge confined
to one private head, repeated in other private heads an in
finity of times, would ever become an organic system of
common knowledge. It must already, in its constitution
reflect its social origin and fitness. The single item of
knowledge, the private self-contained thought of a single
thinker, is the result of refined processes of cognitive differ
entiation. The private thought is not a cognitive unit; it is
a cognitive outcome. The thought that claims the isolation
and absolute lack of common control of an individual unit,
is read off as eccentric and unreal, and its damnation is no
less sure".

Valuation. From this point of view it is an easy transi
tion from ethics and logic to the general theory of Value; and
as we should expect, we find the step taken in a series of works
devoted to the nature and processes of valuation.1 If we find

tion ' how do we get together as citizens in a practical world ?' is now
condemned as unreal and obsolete. We are together and only in
social life do we become relatively separate — relatively private
and independent selves. So the question ' how can we know things
together?' is soon to be similarly outlawed. We do not have to
come together to know; on the contrary, we become only relatively
competent and independent in knowing things separately. The
kingdom of life does not have to naturalize or matriculate its citi
zens; on the contrary it is the citizen of no-man's- land who has lost
his birth-right. So the kingdom of truth has no matriculation
examinations; its process is, on the contrary, the separation from
its body of the individual who insists on privacy and eccentricity.
The normal citizen in this kingdom is the person whose conforming
private judgment is at once the sign of his social fitness."

1 See especially W. M. Urban, Valuation, its Nature and Laws,
1909, in which other citations are to be found. Cf. also the ref
erences given in Diet, of Philos., sub verbo.

DARWINISM AND LOGIC 77

it possible to construe the morally good and also the logically
true as in some sense useful, then it becomes a final problem
to determine what relation such utility has to the Valuable'
as such. And a moment's reflection convinces us that by
leading to a utilitarian interpretation of morals and truth the
Darwinian conception of survival has, in these cases at least,
thrown light upon value. The valuable is that which has
survived on account of its utility. Truth, no less than good
ness or money or art, has its value.

When we generalize this, we make out an instrumental and
utilitarian theory of value in general; that is, of value as
attaching to things. A thing is judged valuable when a
fitness of some sort — social, moral, economic, aesthetic — is
predicated of it. This serves as basis for a detailed scientific
investigation of the conditions and modes of valuation as
springing from varied experiences of utility. Such utilities,
established in social and individual experience, come by
appropriate genetic processes to be reflected in the rules or
'norms' of the 'practical reason'.1

It is evident, however, that in its criterion, value is in some
sense immediate; that is, value is such for the subject or group
in whose experience the utility springs up and develops. The
final test of values of all kinds — understood as attributions of
fitness — is found in the peculiar satisfaction given by the
experiences into which these values enter. This is directly
opposed to the ' formal ' theory which holds that standards
of value, as of truth, are apprehended intuitively apart from
experiences of utility or satisfaction.

It is possible, with value in general — as with moral value,
as indicated in an earlier passage above — to go on to the
recognition of a point of view from which all empirical values,
as now defined, are harmonized in a perfectly satisfying

1 See the first note on p. 7 1 above.

78 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

and, for experience, 'absolute' worth. In this sense the
present writer finds aesthetic experience of absolute worth:
it is an experience of complete and immediate harmony of
values with values, and of values with truths. But this
should not be understood as recognizing absolute worth
as something established apart from the experiences of life.

CHAPTER V

DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY1

In coming to a conclusion as to the influence of Darwin's
thought on philosophy, we should first sum up the general
results of Darwinian views in the different branches of
knowledge with which philosophy deals. If we look upon
philosophy, as many do, as simply the broadest and most
unified view that we can get of the world as a whole, it is
evident that our task will be to set together the results of the
more partial disciplines; the results reached, that is, by the
sciences of fact and value. This leads to the body of theory
embraced by philosophy. Accepting this as a general state
ment of the problem of the content or matter of philosophy, a
preliminary question arises — that of philosophical method.
By what method should philosophy proceed?

Philosophical Method. In an earlier address, in which the
history of psychology was briefly outlined,2 I took occasion
to point out that an epoch in the progress of that science was
inaugurated with the absorption of Darwin's point of view;
and this because it produced a revolution in psychological
method. The following quotation from that paper (slightly
revised) may serve to introduce the topic:

"The rise of the evolution theory in biology supplied the
direct motive to a genetic psychology. Lamarck himself

1 For an able discussion of this topic, see Hoffdings paper in
the Cambridge volume, Darwin and Modern Science.

2 Proceedings of the St. Louis Congress of Arts and Science,
printed also in the Psychological Review, vol. xii, 1905, pp. 144 ff.

79

80 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

recognized the psychological factor in one of his general prin
ciples — that in which he pointed out the function of mind, by
effort, struggle, etc., in modifying the organism to accommo
date it to the environment. The explicit application, how
ever, of the Lamarckian theory to the mind was due to Her
bert Spencer in whose work we recognize a conscious attempt
towbrk out an evolution theory of mind, as a branch of general
cosmology. But it was in the same generation, indeed in the
same decade, that those other Englishmen, Darwin and
Wallace, gave to biology and psychology alike an impulse
which has established a genetic science. For Lamarckism is
not sufficiently 'positive'; it lends itself to the obscurities of
'vitalism.' Only in Darwinism did a thorough-going positivism
of method supplement and correct the partial naturalism of
Spencer and Lamarck. The contribution consisted in extend
ing to the mind the methods of positive and comparative re
search, and the formulation of a principle, that of natural selec
tion, which established genetic continuity and on the basis of
which research could be directed and controlled. It is
somewhat remarkable that Lamarckism never secured the
hold upon the mind of psychologists that it did upon those
of biologists; and the progress toward Darwinian positivism
has had much reinforcement from workers in our science.

"Now — at the beginning of the twentieth century — the
genetic principle is coming into its rights. It has done most
service hitherto negatively, through antagonism to a psychology
exclusively associational, on the one hand, and to one exclu
sively structural, on the other hand. Associationism was debtor
for its 'structural' concept to physics; it was a positivism of
the atomistic or a-genetic type. Later psychology is debtor,
for its 'functional' concept to biology; it is a positivism of
the developmental or genetic type. However fruitful the
atomistic, structural psychology has been, it has had its word,

DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 8 1

and it is not the final word. A great era is upon us of research
by the treatment of consciousness as a thing of functional
evolution in the race, and of personal development in the
individual. The general psychology of the future has been
prepared for in the physical mode of psychologizing, just as
the general biology of the present was prepared for. by the
anatomical science of life which preceded it."

Psychology has always been the vestibule, as it were, to
philosophy, and advance in the latter never gets far beyond
that of the former. So when psy^jiology adopted seriously
a naturalistic and positivistic method — the method, that isf
of the positive sciences of nature philosophy had al«> to
recognize the generality of these points of view. Philo
sophical truth, like all other truth, must be looked upon as
truth about nature — the nature of the world and the nature of
man — and its progress is secured through reflection exercised
under the control of the positive instruments and methods
employed in those subjects. Purely deductive, speculative
and personal systems of philosophy may be useful as gym
nastics and profitable as sources of individual fame; but the
genuine progress of philosophy is to be looked for only through
those methods of confirmation and proof which control the
imagination and permanently satisfy the logical and other
demands of common reflection. There may be different
philosophies, but, like rival scientific hypotheses, each must
show the array of facts, aims, motives, values, etc., that it
can explain better than any other. Philosophy is not an exer
cise of preference, but an exercise of reason!

In these directions Darwin has strongly influenced modern
philosophical thought; so strongly that the historical issues of
philosophy have taken on new forms, which, in the new names
now in vogue to describe them, are unfamiliar to the old-
school philosophers. Instead of the problem 'of 'design,' we

82 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

now have discussions of 'teleology'; instead of the doctrine
of 'chance,' we now have the 'theory of probabilities'; instead
pf 'fatalism' and 'freedom,' we now have 'determinism' and
Vndeterminism,' variously qualified; instead of 'God,' we
hear of 'absolute experience;' instead of 'Providence,' of
'order' and ' law' ; instead of 'mind and body,' of 'dualism or
monism.' Not that all this shifting of emphasis and change
of terms are due to Darwin; but that they are incidents of the
newer antitheses current since the mind has been considered
as subject to 'natural law,' and the world, including God and
man, as common material for science to investigate. Scien
tific naturalism and positivism are methods of unlimited
scope; and the question of philosophy is, what does the whole
system of things, of external facts and of human values alike
— when thus investigated — really turn out to mean P1

Design. I may illustrate this by considering more fully a cen
tral problem — one common to biology and psychology alike,and
one whose answer colors the whole of one's philosophy. It is
the old problem of 'design,' giving rise in biology to theories
of 'special creation' and 'chance,' and now discussed, alike in
biology and psychology, in the form of questions of 'vitalism'
and ' teleology.' In what sense, if any, is the world — and in it,
life and mind — an ordered, progressive and intelligible whole ?
And if it is such in any sense, how did it become so ? Is it due
to intelligence? — and if so, whose intelligence? The most
violent controversies aroused by the publication of the Origin
of Species were let loose about this question. To Darwin's
opponents 'chance,' 'fortuitous or spontaneous variation,'
was to take {Replace of intelligent creation, Providence, God.
If there be no rule of selection and survival save that of utility,
and no source of the useful save the overproduction of chance

1 The terms naturalism and positivism are here used as descrip
tive of methods only, not of philosophical systems.

DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 83

cases, where is the Guiding Hand ? Does not Natural Selec
tion dispense with a ruling Intelligence altogether?

We have only to understand the present-day statement of this
problem to see the enormous concession to naturalism which
the theory of Darwin has forced. Instead of ' chance' in the
sense of uncaused1 accident, we now have the notion of * prob
ability, 'a mathematically exact interpretation of what is only
to superficial observation fortuitous and capricious; instead
of an interfering Providence, we have universal order born of
natural law. And it is within such conceptions as these, now
taken as common ground of argument, that the discussion of
teleology is conducted. The world is no longer thought of as
a piece of mosaic work put together by a skilful artificer — as
the old design theory looked upon it— but as a whole, a cos
mos, of law-abiding and progressive change. A philosopher
who knows his calling today seeks to interpret natural law,
not to discover violations of it. The violations, if they came,
would reduce the world to caprice, chance and chaos, instead
of providing a relief from these things.

So Darwin's view, while administering a coup de grace
to theories of chance and special creation, both equally desul
tory, capricious and lawless, replaced them once for all with
law. It indicated the method of operation by which the pro-

1 Darwin himself described 'spontaneous variation' in these
words (Descent of Man, ed. cit., p. 49): "provisionally called spon
taneous, for, to our ignorance, they appear to arise without any
exciting cause." Darwin, however, was far from holding that they
were uncaused or actually fortuitous, The claim is sometimes put
forth by those who hold to 'determinate' variations and 'self-
directed' evolution (Orthogenesis) that their view replaces chance
with law. See Osborn in the memorial volume Fifty Years of Dar
winism, p. 225, 241. But unless some cause can be shown for the
supposed determinate variations, the assumption of these only
replaces the law of natural selection, and the laws by which varia
tions are actually produced, by new forms of vitalism and mysticism.

84 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

gressive forms of nature are evolved in stages more and more
ordered and fit. The operation of such a law is no less and
no more ' rational,' no less and no more ' fatalistic/ no less and
no more 'atheistic,' than is that of any other law, physical or
mental. What law — meaning simply what regular method of
change — is operative in nature ? and what is its range, as com
pared with other such laws ? — these are questions entirely of
fact, to be determined by scientific investigation. And how far
the method or law called by Darwin ' natural selection' goes,
what its range really is, we are now beginning to see in its
varied applications in the sciences of life and mind. It seems
to be — unless future investigations set positive limits to its
application — a universal principle; for the intelligence itself,
in its procedure of tentative experimentation, or 'trial and
error/ appears to operate in accordance with it.

Indeed, it is in connection with this question that we are
beginning to see how intelligence may, and does, work within
the limits of law, effectively doing its work without violating
the universal natural order. The statistical treatment of
cases by newer methods1 shows that events due to intelligence,
on the one hand, and those observed to fulfil law, on the other
hand, fit into the same curves of distribution, if a sufficiently
large number of cases of each be taken for treatment. Events
involving social and voluntary factors— phenomena of crime,2
the size of families,3 etc., each for itself depending upon
the intelligent and free choice of individuals — when taken in
the mass, follow the same laws of number and variation as do
purely physical events in which there is no element of con
scious determination. In a given community the annual
number of suicides is as constant as the number of deaths

1 See especially K. Pearson, The CJtances of Death, vol. i.

2 Cf . the works of Alorselli and Durkheim, on ' Suicide.'

3 See Pearson, loc. cit.

DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 85

by accident. If this is so, We. need not suppose any essen
tial difference in the results in' the long run; and we may take
our choice as between a purely mechanical interpretation of
all the cases, or an interpretation of them all as-iavohdog a
deeper and more immanent principle which works by eitlter
method or by both. In other words, it is not 'a teleology of
the human type, operating individually and tentatively against
nature, that our philosophy must recognize; but mind in the
larger sense of a principle whose mode of operation is in and
through the reign of natural law. This gives to natural selec
tion the dignity assigned to gravitation or any other cosmic
principle, provided such universal range be finally assigned
to it.1

One other instance may be cited to show how the evolution
theory is serving to bring about a revision of the older philo
sophical conceptions. The notion of 'cause,' as held by the
earlier, more dualistic philosophies, has been transformed with
the advent of a broader naturalism.

Cause. — Among the objections to Darwinism, in the early
days, was one that held that natural selection left no place for
'freedom' or intelligent initiation, but reduced all the se
quences of nature to the level of 'cause and effect,' interpreted
as a mechanical principle of the transfer of physical energy.
It appeared that all movement, the entire dynamic and genetic
aspect of nature, was reduced to a series of compositions and
re-compositions, of transformations and re-transformations, of
a certain physical or energetic stuff. 'Matter in motion' was
the formula of 'cause and effect.'

In the recent developments of the theory of science, how
ever, we begin to see how to make articulate our protest
against this most superficial generalization. 'Cause' is a

1 Further discussion of teleology is to be found in Appendix B.

86 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

broader conception than 'energy.' Only when quantita
tively considered are natural sequences exhausted by me
chanical changes, and qualitative differences are as universal
and natural as are quantitative identities. There must be a
revision of the notion of causation, to allow for the qualitative
growth processes of life and mind, for the new modes of
qualitative appearance that the genetic or developmental
series of changes show. All vital, mental and social series of
changes are of this sort : they are really dynamic, genetic. A
psychological effect is not £ equivalent' to its antecedent con
ditions, considered as its cause, nor in any way identical with
them in a quantitative sense. In what sense can we say, for
example, that a choice is ' equivalent' or 'equal' in
energy to the antecedent motives of the agent? In what
intelligible sense can an organic adaptation, upon whose
utility the subsequent cause of evolution possibly depends,
be said to be a mere transformation of energy, equivalent to
the mechanical forces that condition it? Granted that so
far as it is quantitave, it does follow the physical law, we
still claim that the qualitative aspects are also there and must
have their own interpretation. In many cases of natural
sequences we have to deal with this added aspect of change —
with genetic change, with growth and organization. We ob
serve qualitative not merely quantitative phenomena, modes
of appearance and organization, not mere units of energy;
and we must recognize the making of new modes of quality
in every genetic movement of nature. Nature achieves novel
ties; there may be, qualitatively speaking, more or less in
the effect than there is in the cause.

This position is forced upon us by the radical acceptance of
evolution. Spencer tried to subject the whole evolution
movement to ffle^ntecTianical conception of causation; and he
failed most signally. He interpreted all development in

DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 87

terms of successive transformations of energy. Thus life and
mind alike were eviscerated of all their richer meaning.
So soon, however, as we give genetic change a significance as
fundamental as mechanical change, we reach a very different
result. Every genetic change ushers in a real advance, a
progression on the part of nature to a higher mode of reality.
Actually new things — novelties — are daily achieved in life,
mind and society, results which we can not interpret in terms
of the mere composition of the elements involved. We
cannot predict, for example, the opinions of a group by add
ing together the convictions of the individuals of the group.
Similarly, the outcome of organic growth and of psychologi
cal synthesis alike could not be predicted from the most
exact knowledge of simple organic or psychic 'elements', if
we did not already know in this case or that what to
expect. The entire circle of ideas of 'energetics' is foreign
and artificial to these genetic modes of organization.

Mechanical causation, physical energetics — these are, in
very fact, the poorest and least interesting aspects of nature.
They are instrumental conceptions, fruitful in science; but
along with the processes which these concepts generalize, go
the dynamic, genetic, evolutionary modes of condition and
consequent, which are equally actual and, in a comprehensive
philosophy, infinitely more significant.1

The objection, then, that Darwinism reduces life and
mind to physics, is quite beside the mark. On the contrary,
the very radicalness of Darwin's conception, in forbidding any
compromise with vitalism, accidentalism and all forms of
obscurantism, has compelled the recognition of progressive

1 This point of view is developed by the writer under the head
ing 'Theory of Genetic Modes' in Development and Evohttion,
chap, xix; it is forcefully presented also by Professor H. Bergson in
his work, Evolution crgatrice.

DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

movement, of real evolution, as of the profoundest essence
of nature. The reign of physical science and of mechanical
law over the scientific and philosophic mind is over now, at
the opening of the twentieth century. We have been hypno
tized by the term ' energy' long enough.

These illustrations may suffice to show with what stones
modern thinkers are laying the foundations of a new philoso
phy. I may not now develop the matter further, since my topic
has its limits in the influence of Darwin. But it is easy to see
that with the conception of an immanent principle of change,
issuing in modes of reality which are progressively more
and more significant for the demands of intelligence and
life — the way is open for an interpretation of the world in
terms of an organization of which progressive self-integrating
experience is the type.1

It is sufficient in this place to have shown, that in the work
ing out of such an interpretation, the naturalism of Darwin
has been and will be an important factor.

If, in conclusion, a brief statement were called for of the
sort of influence Darwin has exercised on philosophical
thought, I should sum it up in somewhat the following terms :
Darwin gave the death-blow to uncritical vitalism in biology,
to occultism in psychology, and to mysticism and formalism
in philosophy. Each of these, alike progeny of the obscurant
ism of dogmatic thought, has in turn yielded before the con
ception of natural law and order embodied by Darwin in the
theory of natoaTsdectionf^^Thi s in turn requires the radi
cal acceptance of a genetic or dynamic view of the world.

1 It should be remembered that Hegel attempted systematically
to incorporate the idea of development in a system which is rad
ically idealistic in character.

. DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 89

F§ The theory of natural selection is to be accepted not merely
as a law of biology as such, but as a principle of the natural
world, which finds appropriate application in all the sciences
of life and mind.

~y

rely
ural
ices A

CHAPTER VI

DARWINISM AND RELIGION1

The growth of a positively scientific and naturalistic method
of enquiry in the mental and moral sciences, and of the his
torical point of view in the political and social sciences,
could not fail to show itself, also, in the study of the phenomena
of religion. The topic, it is evident, is open to approach
from the side both of historical and of psychological science.
We find, accordingly that the analytic and formal methods
of studying religion, which have been so long in vogue, have
, in recent years yielded to what is known as the 'genetic'
method. This latter concerns itself with the study of religion in
its development in the individual and its evolution in the race.

This study, as now-a-days prosecuted, takes on, as I have
just intimated, two great forms, in both of which we find the
further carrying out of the influences already characterized
as Darwinian.

I. Anthropo- genetic study: — the study of the modes or
forms of religion viewed historically, racially, comparatively.
It comprises the historical investigation of religion in all
its forms, considered as a social institution, and as a factor
in the evolution of human culture. It is an important chap
ter in Anthropology.

II. Psycho- genetic study: — the study of the modes, stages,
objects of personal religious experience as such. Its prob-

1 Revised text of a paper presented to the Fourth Inter. Cong,
of the Hist, of Religion, Oxford, August, 1908, under the title 'The
Genetic Study of Religion'.

90

DARWINISM AND RELIGION 9 1

v-

lem is that of the development of personal religion in the
individual: a problem of Psychology.

The former of these branches of the genetic study of religion
may be called the Comparative Science of religion, the latter
its Genetic Psychology. And to one who entertains both
these points of view, finding interesting conclusions estab
lished in both fields, the further important question arises as
to the relation of the two sets of results to each other. There
must be, indeed, a comparison and correlation of the results
reached respectively by the historical student, on the one
hand, and the psychological student, on the other hand.
Anthropology and psychology are thus brought together in
the genetic investigation of one of the most important of
our human interests.

I wish in this brief chapter merely to point out that there
are certain very interesting points of correlation already
established and that these are the fruits of the genetic method
pursued in the spirit of Darwinism. The results of genetic
study in the one field, that of psychology, has confirmed some
of the most remarkable generalizations reached in the other,
that of Anthropology.

In the first place, however, a word is necessary as to the
relation of these two great fields of inquiry to each other.
When they are viewed genetically, it is evident that they
are not really two fields, two sets of phenomena. The series
of anthropological facts, when traced in their development
in human history, from the more primitive to the more
developed stages of religious culture, must of course be
interpreted by the actual religious experience of individuals
at the several stages. Each religious institution, at the time
it was alive, required men having vital religious experiences

92 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

of a particular sort. The recognition of this enables us to
establish a canon of anthropological research, to the effect
that no result of such research can be finally made out, in the
interpretation of a given set of facts, unless the psychology
of the group or tribe in question be such as to support and
confirm it.

For example, the contention that an 'idea of God' as a
being 'ethically perfect', or 'metaphysically infinite', is present
in the crudest religions, is refuted when we remember the
simple fact, established by psychology, that the religious
experience of individuals, in the primitive stages of culture,
does not contain such an 'idea of God.' The view, too,
that the object of religious worship is always a 'spirit', requires
that we make a new definition of ' spirit ' for each of the stages
of religious experience which we find to be ever more crude
as we trace the history backward. Could such or such an
object of worship, conceived in spiritual terms, have been
present at the particular stage under investigation — that is
the question it is necessary to ask in each case. And it is
the psychologist who must give the answer.

The reverse is also true. Vital religious experiences issue
in typical modes of religious life, and embody themselves
in institutions, which the anthropologist is called upon to study.
The psychologist, tracing out the development of the type
of experience he calls religious, must constantly recognize
the checks afforded by anthropology. He cannot, for exam
ple, rest content with an individualistic theory of religion —
the view that religion springs up in the individual in the form
of rational insight or private intuition — in the face of the
conclusion drawn from comparative and anthropological
study, to the effect that religion is, in its origin, always
social — always an institution of gradual evolution, embodying
the results of social intercourse, and showing a certain unity

DARWINISM AND RELIGION 93

of personal motive and practice among the individuals of a
community.

These two sciences indeed, share the demand made also
upon other sciences in which both individual development
and racial evolution are under investigation. Social life, at
any stage of racial evolution, cannot be held to embody prin
ciples of organization, nor to comprise institutions, for which
full ground cannot be found in the personal growth and
capacity of the individuals of that group at that time. On
the other hand, psychology cannot hold that certain types
of thought and life were current in any group of peoples
unless the anthropologist in turn actually finds institutional
or other evidence of such experiences, as historical fact.
Personal experience can never release itself from the bond
to racial culture which gives it its necessary environment and
support. In the case before us this means that a religion
is always the embodiment of the actual religious experience
of individuals of a certain grade of culture, while religious
experience in turn is always a personal interpretation of
an existing religion. Not only religious conformity, but also
religious revolt, involves the assimilation and re-interpretation
of what is found in actual religious institutions.

In their nature and order, therefore, the stages discovered
in the development of the personal religious experience of
individuals coincide or concur, in a large way, with those
discovered in the history of religion itself.

It is not my object, however, to dwell upon these rules of
scientific procedure, nor to illustrate them in detail. They
show, however, the rapproachement between these two
sciences, brought about by the evolution theory. I wish, on
the contrary, to pass at once to my main point — which is
that the method is justified by the striking parallelism or con
currence of results in these two relatively independent fields.

94 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

I may now proceed to cite cases of such parallelism or
concurrence. They are all well established, as I believe,
by recent studies in psychology and anthropology.

II

It is necessary, at the start, to state certain of the results
of historical study — comparative ' anthropo-genetic results'—
as a basis for the selection of our psychological data. I
think the following general statements will be widely accepted
by anthropologists and students of comparative religion; if
not just in the form here adopted, still without essential
modification of meaning.

i. There is no one form always assumed by the object of
worship, no single embodiment of deity common to all
religions. The form of the object of worship is subordinate
to the meaning given to it in the intention of the devotee.
The actual object — the content 'presented' or set up before
the mind, to speak in psychological terms — varies from the
crudest physical and inanimate objects up to the highest
abstractions of thought and the noblest creations of art.

2~/What is common, on the other hand, to all objects of
religious veneration is their symbolism, their meaning as
bearing the further interpretation given them by their religious
use. There is no fixed religious 'idea,' but rather a common
way of treating various ideas in thought, feeling and intention.
Objects of many sorts fulfil in common a group of personal
and social demands which we describe as religious. What
all ' gods ' have in common is their meaning for the worshipper,
whereby they afford appropriate ends or termini for his
attitudes and dispositions of worship.

3. Religion is found to be everywhere essentially a social
phenomenon, an institution of first-rate public significance
in its time and place. Religious rites are bound up with —

DARWINISM AND RELIGION 95

originate in or with — give value to — a great body of conven
tions, customs, traditions, laws. The religious sanctions,
the rewards and punishments prescribed by religion for cer
tain types of conduct, are earlier in social evolution than the
legal and ethical sanctions. In primitive culture, the temple
is the locus of social authority, and the priest is the executive
of the social will. Moreover, religious authority remains
the court of final appeal, which interprets and develops the
growing body of social tradition, and adds by its decisions to
the mass of social rights, duties, privileges and beliefs.

4. The embodiment of the religious meaning, what we
have called the 'content' of the object of religious worship,
the deity, is always personal or quasi-personal; that is, it
always has for the worshipper the significance of an agency
like himself. However dead the mere thing of worship, the
image, the fetish, the work of art, may be, it still means a
center of behavior which may be taken to indicate an attitude
on the part of the God toward the worshipper.

These are results established by anthropology for which we
may seek confirmation in psychology. They stand out as
features of the historical movement of religious evolution,
when we look at its longitudinally progress through the ages.
They apply to all the stages, and become the differentia of
the movement: so that, by applying these criteria, we can
define a movement of culture or an institution as religious.
We may sum them up for our present purposes somewhat in
this way: religion, historically considered, is, (i) a mass of
developing meaning or tradition more or less successfully
embodied in a series of objects, ideas and beliefs. This
mass of meaning is (2) socially derived, established and
preserved. For the individual (3) it takes on the form of
a personal god, correlative with his own personal self, and
developing in his experience with the growth of his own per
sonality.

g6 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

III

If these things be true — if religion is what the gods mean
to the worshipper — if this meaning is social and personal,
fulfilling a demand that arises in the development of the
individual as a person — if these things be true, then as psy
chologists we should find most interesting 'concurrences'
between these results and our own. To show that this is the
case we will now consider in turn certain results reached in
genetic and social psychology; and then go on to show their
bearing in the present connection.

The question for psychology, of course, is the broad one,
what is religious experience? — is it the sort of experience,
in the individual, that could and does embody itself in the
social institutions described by anthropology in the foregoing
terms? Is religious experience, in short, what it would be
if the anthropologists are right in their definition of religion ?
Let us enquire broadly then what the psychologist of today
has to say about personal religious experience.

A truth common to the genetic and social psychology of
today, is embodied in the statement that the development of
self-consciousness in the individual is not a private move
ment, circumscribed by the single person's mind. On the
contrary, this development is social to the core. It involves,
as we^have seen on an earlier page, intercourse with other
persons. It is through the imitative and other give-and-take
processes proper to all education that the individual's thought
of himself in personal terms is built up. The conscious
ness of self is not an intuition, a bit of rational insight, shot
into his mind, as so many seem to think. It is gradually
formed through social experience with other selves; it is at
first crude, imperfect, and subject to many illusions. Only
gradually are the boundaries of the single self marked out

DARWINISM AND RELIGION 97

and the limits of one's own 'self determined. And this
content, thus socially derived through intercourse, is read
again into each person of the social group in the terms in
which the individual is able to conceive it of himself; only
to be read again into himself, with the added knowledge
derived from his attempt to understand others. The result
ing self, the self of self-consciousness, is what we have called
above a 'socius,' a companion, a self-among-selves, a self
that maintains a life of give-and-take, of intercourse and
mutual reaction with others in a series of social situations.
Each such 'socius,' by his very apprehension of himself,
apprehends also the relationships which give him. his social
status and place.

If this is the nature of the thought of self, its materials being
common to many individuals alike, then the dispositions, emo
tions, and attitudes characteristic of the self will be the same,
or similar, toward persons; that is, these dispositions and
attitudes will be not private and individual, but common and
social. They will attach to self-in-general — to your, my,
him-self. My fellow-feeling for one in pain, for example, will
show itself as naturally for you in the form of sympathy,
as for myself in the form of grief and self-love. So with all
the personal emotions and passions. They do not belong to
an isolated person, who considers his own interest alone;
but to a 'socius', a companion, who thinks along with himself
of all the other selves as well.

The first result to be noted, therefore, in the consideration
of the psychology of personality is that the individual's devel
opment is dependent upon social relationships, and his atti
tudes toward his fellows in these relationships — sympathetic,
altruistic, social — spring up naturally with his knowledge
or thought of himself.

Again, second, we find, in the development of the sense of

98 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

self that there are two contrasted poles or points of reference
which stand out in more or less contrast in all the situations
of life. There is, on the one hand, the individual personal
self, the 'ego,' in which the material takes on the form of
'my-self:' and on the other hand, there is the self of the
other person to whom the ego stands in relation — called the
'alter,' or 'other-self.' These two seem, on occasion, to be
in rather strong contrast to each other, and the question
arises whether the statement of this state of relative opposition
between the 'ego' and the 'alter' does not contradict the
statement just made to the effect that the self-thought is one.

The solution of this apparent contradiction leads us to a
third psychological position in the statement of which we
come back to the topic of religion again. There are in every
mind — the child's, say, when he thinks of himself as being in
a given situation with others — not only the two contrasted
selves, facing each other and urging, possibly, their opposing
interests; but also, in addition, a sense of the presence of a
possible 'good self,' a higher or ideal personality, whose
decision would be, in all cases, the proper and correct one.
This is what is called the 'ideal self.' It is the germ of all
experience properly called moral or religious; and its impor
tance warrants our saying a little more about it.

In all the progress of the mind, the imagination is the instru
ment of learning and discovery. There is a constant project-
tion of our meanings by the imagination, a reaching forward,
in the way of assumption and hypothesis — the attempt to
imagine and forestall what is still to come. In this way
many of the problems of actual life are solved in advance
by the imagination. All experimentation, in science and in
practical life, depends upon this, involving as it does, the
imaginative building up of hypotheses and their testing to
find out whether, as matter of fact, they work.

DARWINISM AND RELIGION 99

In this way the imagination is submitted to the control of
fact or truth. The external world becomes a 'control' of
knowledge, regulating the use of imagination; and the world
of persons becomes the control of the imagination is the
sphere of personal interests, desires and achievements.

This movement of the imagination takes place also in the
sphere of the personal self. The imaginative projection of
personality takes on the form of an ideal self, a person for
whom the contradictions and struggles of the actual opposi
tion of selves do not exist, the person who knows all, who
is perfect, who furnishes, in the world of ideal truths and
values, the control of the imagination. Just as there is an
ideal truth by which the imagination of things and events
is to be controlled, and also an ideal goodness by which the
practical strivings and relations of life should be controlled,
so finally there is the ideal personality, which includes the
partial and contrasting selves of our actual lives. This ideal,
the ideal self, is 'God.'

Godjs Reconstruction of the imagination, beyond the con
crete single cases of self -hood that we know: it is an ideal
set up and considered as actual. Considered as a factor
in experience, God is the supposed or imagined Self, which
is the outcome of the self-movement toward perfection — the
control-meaning anticipated by all the partial adjustments
which finite selves effect to one another. As the ethical de
mand or postulate is one of a completed social order, and
its ideal one of harmonious practical relationships in a social
community; so the religious demand or postulate is that of
a perfect self, a fully realized or complete person, in whom
the opposition between private and public interests would
be completely overcome.

These two ideals, the social and the religious, it should be
remarked, are correlative to each other. The perfect social

100 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

order requires the morally perfect individual; and the perfect
individual could arise only in the midst of a perfect social
order. They indicate one and the same ideal, when differ
ently approached. Both represent the movement of the
growth of the self — one toward practical adjustment, the
other toward inner perfection, harmony and tranquility.

With this brief statement of the bearing on our topic of
recent psychological theory as to the growth of personality,
we are prepared to see in what manner it confirms the teach
ings of anthropology respecting religion.

Psychology, in fact, by the establishment of this view of
the social character of the self and of its development in the
realm of ideals of morals and religion, confirms at one stroke
certain most interesting results in anthropology. Let us
turn now to the points of harmony or concurrences between
the two sciences.

First, we have seen that, for psychology, the ideal self is an
interpretation which arises naturally and normally in experi
ence with the growth of the personal consciousness of self.
It is relatively crude or refined in its meaning, according to
the stage of development of the self. The ideal develops
pari passu with the actual self.

This, it is evident, is in full harmony with the anthropolo
gist's finding to the effect that the meaning cherished by
religion is not identified with the mere object that bears it,
but is always symbolic; and that this meaning varies with the
stage of culture and the type of social life of the tribe or
group. Now it is a crude 'animation' or 'personification;'
again one of nature's forces or typical operations is made
vaguely 'spiritual,' as the agent of vengeance or aid: again,
in the higher reaches of culture, a work of art is made to
symbolize the religious mystery; and yet again the object
takes on the form of a rational system of beliefs. All this

DARWINISM AND RELIGION IOI

shows a real evolution in religious experience, proceeding
concurrently in the individual and the race — appearing not
only in the symbolic meaning, the personal intention, which
spiritualizes or 'personalizes' the framework of ideas of
objective symbols, but also in the choice of the things, ideas,
concepts, symbols which serve as framework. There is a
progressive refinement, both in the idea, the divine object,
and in its spiritual meaning.

Second, the social character of religion, as made out by
anthropology, finds its explanation in the social nature of
the self, as discovered by psychology. There is here also a
striking case of harmony or concurrence between the two
sciences.

It appears in this way: the ideal self or deity to the individ
ual, is the further carrying out, in the imagination, of the
self -meaning; and this includes other individuals as well as
the personal self. It is the ideal of a group, of a set of social
relations, showing practical and moral oppositions, embar
rassments and achievements. It is not the ideal held by
other tribes and races. The deity shows the growth of the
normal social relations, and reflects their character, because
he is the projected personal ideal of the group. While the
deity must be thought of by these individuals as apart from
them, since he is personal, yet he is the controlling spiritual
presence, the voice, the oracle of the group, and may be
approached through the proper mediation with rites and
ceremonies. The tribe's deity is in this important sense, then,
the tribal spirit; he is conceived in terms of the tribal self.
The ideal that hovers over the personal self of the individual
and impregnates his spiritual life, is one with the tribal or
national self-consciousness. 'Great is Diana of the Ephe-
sians' is not only a formula of personal religious experience;
it is also a proclamation of civic or national unity : and both

102 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

are possible in one because, in the process by which the indi
vidual idealizes his life in community with others, he also
in common with them, erects a communal or national ideal
"The perfect self," he might say, "which I should attain, is
the same as that which you also find you should attain; and
it is the same that we both imagine as our national spirit
patron, or God. Deity may always be taken, therefore
to reveal the communal ideal of personality, as that develops
continuously, while, at the same time, it supplies the appro
priate object for the individual's personal worship.1

Third. In a third respect also — that in which anthropology
establishes the personal character of God considered as
object of religious devotion— a very clear confirmation comes
from psychology.

Of course, if religious experience proceeds by an idealiza
tion of self, as psychology asserts, nothing but a persona
self can be its appropriate object. The principle point ol
interest, then, becomes the actual manifestation of this process
of idealization. This is what anthropology supplies in greai
detail. The psychological need of objectivication is always
present; it takes dn forms indicative of the state of culture o:
the particular community. In very primitive times, before th<
race has clearly learned to distinguish persons as such fron
the more active and capricious manifestations of nature, these
latter are 'vitalized,' 'personalized,' 'anthropomorphized
by the religious consciousness. Moving, capricious, explosive
unpredictable things and events are taken for manifestation:
of deity — portents, omens, eclipses, earthquakes, diseases
especially nervous and mental manifestations — all unusua

1 The Jehovah of the Hebrews is the embodiment both of the
national aspirations, as voiced in the religion of the prophets, and alsc
of the ethical qualities of the Jews; the contrast which Jehovah pre
sents to the polytheisic Gods of the Greeks has always attracted com
ment.

DARWINISM AND RELIGION 103

or obscure processes and happenings; and at this stage the
objects adopted to represent and embody deity are similarly
crude. But they represent, as the omens of nature do, the
devotee's ways of representing the ideal self. The amulet,
the fetish, the idol in some conventionalized form, stands
for the deity; not indeed merely standing for it, but really
being it, in the sense of embodying its essential presence and
meaning to the worshipper. These are not for him dead
things; they are centers of life — what would be to us cer
tainly a crude life, a low order of self-hood, but to him just
what our refined, artistic and rational symbolism is to us.

This intent to discover deity, in all stages of culture essen
tially the same, shows itself in many devices for approaching
the indwelling life or spirit. The same devices are effectual
in actual life — a further indication that the essence of the
religious meaning is personal. The child approaches his
father in much the same way as the religious devotee ap
proaches the Great Father: he endeavors to please, to placate,
to appease, to influence in some way, the action and dispo
sition of the superior person. In religious history, to make
this appeal effective, an elaborate system of mediating rites
and personalities is developed.

In later development, such attempts to establish a happy
relation with a remote and not impartial deity are superseded
by other means of attaining communion and union with God;
means of bringing the private self into common life with its
ideal. Expiation, atonement, reconciliation, communion,
these are all terms for aspects of this one great movement
of personality. It testifies to the truth of the view that religion
is a matter of progressive personal idealization.

The sacrifice of the devotee of Baal, or that of the victim
of Juggernaut, the suffering of the ascetic, and the resignation
of the martyr, all spring from the same motive — the need

104 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

to be at one with the Ideal, the need to be the Ideal Self, whose
form and whose requirements the growth of individual and
tribe alike prescribe. Be the form what it may, be the object
worshipped never so mean, be the religious mode of expres
sion never so barbarous, cruel, unaesthetic, all this is unim
portant; for through it all the striving of the spirit to realize
what the object stands for, its groping to be at one with its
personal and social ideal, this is always there, and this is
religion.1

IV

In the three respects now pointed out, the concurrence in
result of researches in anthropology and psychology is strik
ing and important. When we come to carry out the details
a little further, certain additional points of interest appear
which I may briefly state as corollaries.

a. It appears from this account, th^t religion is not an
artifact in human culture, not a secondary and useless product
of human evolution — not an c epiphenomenon ' merely. On
the contrary, it embodies an essential phase of personal
nr™T£TE— ar. ocp^t ^{rh ^rtwg *tT1f fi|f>lfp 1>n ^e individual's
development and in the evolution of societies. The personal
self cannot grow without constantly taking from society its
essential nourishment; nor can it grow without in turn 'eject
ing ' "agam"" mTolHe^social fellows its own experiences of strug
gle and achievement. Thus by a two-fold movement, the
ideal personality is constantly reconstructed; it rests upon
the basis of growing personal experience and social usage.

1 One of the biological thinkers of the past generation who in
terpreted the Deity as an ideal person — a personal 'eject', to use his
term— was G. J. Romanes. The psychological view here sketched
is worked out in detail in the chapters on Religion (chaps, viii
and x) of the writer's Social and Ethical Interpretations; see also
the arts, on 'Religion' by several authors in the Diet, of Philosophy.

DARWINISM AND RELIGION 105

b. Again, from the anthropological point of view, we see
that religious institutions, cults, usages of all sorts are a
necessary part of the manifestations of human life. Every
where the religious impulse shows itself in some concrete
social form; embodies itself, so to speak, in the garments
of history. The heathen carves out an idol with his hands; it
is the vehicle of his religious faith. The ethnologist discovers
it centuries after, unravels its meaning, and preserves it in
a museum as an object-lesson in the culture of the epoch it
represents. The philosophical Deist, at the other end of
the historical scale, works out the reasons for his faith,
denning his Deity in abstract propositions; these are the vehi
cles of his religious faith. The literary collector preserves
his manuscript in a library — the museum of written ideas.
Both alike, together with all the innumerable other relics
deposited along the line of historical culture, from heathen
idol to philosophical creed, reveal the one impulse, exhibit
the same, the uniform human need : that of setting up a Self,
ideal in character, personal in form, as the goal of develop
ment and the end of striving.

To eradicate religion, therefore, would be to mutilate
personality and deflect the course of development both of
individual spiritual life and of social progress. The need
of religion is the same for both. Individuals find in an object,
> a symbol, a creed, the embodiment of the ideal which satis-
| fies their religious needs; and this, just through the public
? or social character of the embodiment and the means of its
' realization, issues in a cult, a church, a religious communion.
Man cannot have a private religion; men must be religious
together. They cannot be religious together without a tradi
tion, a local home, a more or less elaborate ritual or body of
procedure. The creed, on the one hand, is the natural
embodiment of the objective religious content or system of

106 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

ideas; the cult, on the other hand, is the equally natural
embodiment of the social processes which unite the individuals
in loyalty to a spiritual order.

One may say, of course, that humanity might have devel
oped otherwise, might have rid itself of religion, or might
do so still. Possibly, had humanity itself been different.
What might have been, is a different question from what has
been. We can only conjecture what the body and mind
alike would have been — to take another case — if any one of
the great animal or mental functions had been lacking or
had been much altered. The issue would have been different,
granted there could have been a development at all. So
here: the process of self -consciousness normally issues in
social and moral life, and this idealizes itself in religion.
What development of personality might have been possible,
had this social bond been absent, who can tell? It is not
our business to find out. But we can say — as we have said
just above — that if, in the future, by processes of reflection,
hedonistic, egoistic, anarchistic, Nitschian or other, religion
be eliminated from human life, it will nevertheless certainly
have its sublimated equivalent in some form of renewed mys
ticism, in which the outreach toward the ideal will again
embody itself. The time is full of indications of this. The
man who scoffs at a creed stands in awe before the mysteries
of table-turning and spirit-rapping; and the sceptic in the
matter of miracles, accepts faith cures, telepathic messages
from the unseen world, second sight and other equally miracu
lous violations of the natural order. The religious spirit,
in short, outlives its recurrent forms of embodjr^nt^andjhe
rejection of this religion or tnat, inis ideal or that, is always
in the interest of some other embodiment, in which the same
spiritual movement hastens to clothe itself.

c. Finally, coming back to the sober tasks of science, we

DARWINISM AND RELIGION 107

see that religion is an impo^^^^ every

point of "view. Important vistas are opened upinmstory,

in sociology, in education, so soon as \ve see that there is one
genetic motive only, one factor at work, in the development
of the individual and the progress of society; it is only the
growth of human personality. Such enquiry unifies special
researches in many fields. The study of religion throws
light upon politics, upon industry, upon education — upon
all the departments and interests in which the human spirit
shows its activities. For the religious motive is a comprehen
sive social motive; in religious history, we trace events and
describe institutions, in which the sociologist detects the bond
of human brotherhood in its most essential forms. The
educationist finds in the religious utterances of the child, as
the anthropologist finds in the religious ceremonies of the
race, indices to the pages of the volume of civilization.

In conclusion, I may recall our starting point — recall that
we started out to describe the value of a certain point of
view, the genetic, in which the influence of Darwinism shows
itself in the study of Religion. The results show, both in
spirit and in letter, the fruitfulness of the evolutionary theory
in one of the great topics of anthropology and psychology.
If we should take up, one by one, the more specific factors of
Darwinism and seek to find them in this field, we should
again recount what we have already discovered in the chapter
on the Social Sciences. Religion is handed down by ' social
heredity' — it illustrates the power of ' variations' in moral
and mental characters and products — it shows the need of
inner organization in the form of idealization, to fit a
group or nation for its competitive life. Religion, by con- *| *
serving morality, by cultivating the best, the most social,
self in a people, makes the state more fit.. Religion is both a

108 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

j personal satisfaction and a social weapon. To use the terms
employed above, it has both immediate and instrumental
Value.

THE END

APPENDIX A.
Darwin's Judgment

The main consideration which this paper1 aims to present, that
of the responsibility of all men, be they great or be they small, to
the same standards of social judgment, and to the same philo
sophical treatment, is illustrated in the very man to whose genius
we owe the principle upon which my remarks are based — Charles
Darwin; and it is singularly appropriate that we should also find
the history of this very principle, that of variations with the corre
lative principle of selection, furnishing a capital illustration of our
inferences. Darwin was, with the single exception of Aristotle,
possibly the man with the sanest judgment that the human mind
has ever brought to the investigation of nature. He represented,
in an exceedingly adequate way, the progress of scientific method
up to his day. He was disciplined in all the natural science of his
predecessors. His judgment was an epitome of the scientific
insight of the ages which culminated then. The time was ripe
for such a great constructive thought as his — ripe, that is, as far
as the accumulation of scientific data was concerned. His judg
ment differed then from the judgment of his scientific contempo
raries mainly in that it was sounder and safer than theirs. And
with it Darwin was a great constructive thinker. He had the
intellectual strength which put the judgment of his time to the
strain — everybody's but his own. This is seen in the fact that
Darwin was not the first to speculate in the line of his great dis
covery, nor to reach formulas; but with the others, guessing took
the place of induction. The formula was an uncriticised thought.
The unwillingness of society to embrace the hypothesis was justi-

*Extract from an essay on Genius; see the writer's popular work
Story of the Mind, Chap. x.

109

110 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

fied by the same lack of evidence which prevented the thinkers
themselves from giving it proof. And if no Darwin had appeared,
the problem of biological development would have been left about
where it had been left by the speculations of the Greek mind .
Darwin reached his conclusion by what that other great scientific
genius in England, Newton, described as the essential of discovery,
'patient thought;' and having reached it he had no alternative but
to judge it true and pronounce it to the world.

But the principle of variations with natural selection had the
reception which shows that good judgment may rise higher than
the level of its own social origin. Even now the principle of Darwin
is but a spreading ferment in many spheres of human thought in
which it is destined to bring the same revolution that it has worked
in the sciences of organic life. It was not until other men, who
had both authority with the public and sufficient information to
follow Darwin's thought, seconded his judgment that his great
discovery began to have currency in scientific circles.

A passage in Professor Poulton's Charles Darwin and the Theory
of Natural Selection (1896, pp. i2f.) is so fully in accord with
the position of my text that I allow myself to quote it entire :

"It is a common error to suppose that the intellectual powers
which make the poet or historian are essentially different from
those which make the man of science. Powers of observation,
however acute, could never make a scientific discoverer; for dis
covery requires the creative effort of the imagination. The scien
tific man does not stumble upon new facts or conclusions by acci
dent; he finds what he looks for. The problem before him is
essentially similar to that of the historian who tries to create an
accurate and complete picture of an epoch out of scattered records
of contemporary impressions more or less true, and none wholly
true. Fertility of imagination is absolutely essential for that step
from the less to the more perfectly known, which we call discovery.

"But fertility of imagination alone is insufficient for the highest
achievements in poetry, history, or science; for in all these subjects
the strictest self-criticism and the soundest judgment are necessary
in order to insure that the results are an advance in the direction
of the truth.

APPENDIX A III

"It is probable then that the secret of Darwin's strength lay in
the perfect balance between his powers of imagination and those of
accurate observation, the creative efforts of the one being ever sub
jected to the most relentless criticism by the employment of the
other. 'We shall never know,' I have heard Professor Michael
Foster say, 'the countless hypotheses which passed through the
mind of Darwin, and which, however wild and improbable, were
tested by an appeal to nature, and were then dismissed forever.'

" Darwin's estimate of his own powers is given with characteristic
candor and modesty in the concluding paragraph of his Auto
biography (Life and Letters, 1887, p. 107):

" 'Therefore my success as a man of science, whatever this may
have amounted to, has been determined, as far as I can judge,
by complex and diversified mental qualities and conditions. Of
these the most important have been — the love of science — un
bounded patience in long reflecting over any subject — industry in
observing and collecting facts — and a fair share of invention as
well as of common sense. With such moderate abilities as I
possess, it is truly surprising that I should have influenced to a
considerable extent the belief of scientific men on some important
points.' "

APPENDIX B.

Darwinism and Logic

In his interesting paper, having the same title as this note, pub
lished in the Darwin Number, May, 1909, of this Review1, Professor
J. E. Creighton cites my work, Thought and Things, as representa
tive of the Darwinian point of view in logic, and criticises it in
some detail. I am, of course, gratified that the work is honored in
this way. I find, however, that Professor Creighton's criticisms
are not altogether valid, and I will accordingly suggest certain con
siderations which in my opinion show this.

Professor Creighton has no difficulty in proving by quotations
from my different publications, that I am a Darwinian, and that
Darwinian conceptions have had frequent application in my work.
Nor has he greater difficulty in showing that I often take the stand
point from which experience is looked upon as an immanent self-
integrating movement. But he considers these two points of view
inconsistent with each other: one interprets experience 'biologically'
— as a relation of organism and mind to environment — the other
' logically' or ' ideologically' (so Professor Creighton) — as a principle
of internal organization and movement. The question then is
this : can both of these points of view be held at once ? — or does
either commit us to a philosophy which excludes the other?

Evidently the first, the method and view-point of biological sci
ence, must be upheld if we are to have a theory of mental develop
ment and evolution at all. Each mind grows up in a body, and
both mind and body are in environments. Experience requires
things and situations; its own movement establishes and utilizes
what we call the 'trans-subjective reference.' Is the recognition of

1 From the Psychological Review, November 1909.

112

APPENDIX B 113

this consistent with a theory which interprets experience as a pro
gressive organization having its own ' logic' ?

Professor Creighton thinks that the latter point of view commits
one to a 'teleology' which— though some what vague to me— seems
to require the denial of the validity of a Darwinian conception of
adaptation, considered as a necessary factor in the development of
experience.1

Proceeding then to the criticism of my views, made by Professor
Creighton, I may say that it is in my last work alone, the ' Genetic
Logic,' that I have taken exclusively the point of view of experience.
It should not be compared with the other more biological books and
papers except as this difference is recognized.2

In the Genetic Logic the attempt is made to trace out the actual
movement of experience from mode to mode, all of these modes
being equally 'psychic.' The result is reached that a dualism of
controls, due to segregation of contents, is come upon in experience
itself. This dualism is not injected by our interpretation, nor read
in from an external point of view: it is found by and in the process.
The impoitant point is that by its own immanental movement into
the logical mode, experience establishes just the dualism that science
adopts and employs. In the discussion of the relation of the ' psy
chic' and 'objective' points of view (Thought and Things , I, chap.

1 He uses the expression 'genetic or ideological' as if these two
terms were synonymous (loc. cit., p. 185).

2 It is a conscious and deliberate difference, and cannot be looked
upon as a contradiction unless it can be shown that one of the points
of view is rendered invalid when one takes the other. In the Social
Interpretations, both methods are used on occasion, to supplement
and confirm each other, the biological, however, having a very sub
ordinate place. In the Genetic Logic, the standpoint of experience,
the 'psychic' point of view, is consistently maintained. It is
erroneous, therefore, to say (Creighton, p. 180), "Professor Bald
win's account professes to show, not how the mind becomes con
scious of its own logical nature, but how that logical nature is
engendered in it through the motor adjustments of the organism to
material conditions." How the mind becomes [grows to be] con
scious of its logical nature [or processes] is just what the Genetic
Logic does profess to show.

114 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

n'> §§ 3> 4), I show that the latter is simply the explicit outcome of
the dualism normally established when the mode of judgment or
reflection is reached.1 The scientific is simply the logical point of
view made use of as deliberate method. It involves the self
thinking of objects which are judged about or observed— objects
known to it as 'things.' This very dualism is the presupposition
of the logical as such; and scientific method— whether its results
issue in Darwinism, Lamarckism, vitalism, mechanism, teleology
or any other type of theory — is thinking, no more and no less than
thinking. In the more refined operations of thought upon ideas,
the ideas are symbols of the things into which they are at anytime
convertible. The sciences of observation go directly to the things,
to perceptions and sensations; but in both cases the control of the
context, whether it be one of ideas or of things, is the same — that
of a sphere taken by the process to be foreign to itself.

So far then from finding a contradiction between the point of
view of evolution — dualistic as it is— and that of a psychic account
of the genesis of logical process, I find that the latter issues in
and justifies the former. Any adequate tracing out of the progres
sion of knowledge, within experience itself, shows it to issue in a
system of judgments in which the two controls— things as 'outer' and
the self as 'inner'— are found confronting each other. Reflection
sublimates this dualism by erecting a mediating context of ideas;
but all validities in the context and all truthful references beyond it,
rest upon the fact that this mediation is dual.

What then I would insist upon is the radically unreal character of
the supposed contradiction. The observation, experimentation,
analysis, etc., of biological science, a; of all science, are processes
proper and vital to the logical mode of experience. Science is
logical process proceeding under its normal and necessary presup
positions. In recognizing the externality of things— the environ-

1 Instead of allowing Professor Creighton's interpretation to the
effect that the "inner and outer controls' are in my hands 'a
translation into other terms of the organism and environment,' I
hold that the relation of organism and environment is a logical

transformation of the dualism of inner outer and controls.

APPENDIX B 115

ment — it is only following the essential movement of psychic process,
which although presupposing exernality, still finds it to be a mean
ing of contrast with the internality of the inner control, of the self.
Accordingly, one may freely use the biological method and point
of view (as I have done in the paper on 'selective thinking' which
Professor Crei^hton considers very reprehensible in this respect) ;
for this procedure only recognizes as valid, for purposes of delib
erate observation, the dualism that logical experience itself estab
lishes for all the processes of thought.1

Of course, the further question will be asked : Is one's final philo
sophical view then to be dualistic? — is logical experience to be
taken at its word and as the final word ? Professor Creighton, as
just cited, says that I recognize only two alternatives, mechanism and
apriorism; and he suggests the third, teleology. But my recogni
tion of these two modes of interpretation is merely to cite them as
horns of a dilemma both of which are to be avoided.2 The teleo-
logical interpretation, also, taken in its ordinary sense — barring
its excessive ambiguity — is also to be questioned, and for much the
same reasons. These reasons I may now briefly state.3

i . We are only remaining true to the standpoint of experience
itself in seeking to trace out the rise and development of such cate
gories as mechanism and teleology. They arise as meanings attach
ing to different sorts of experience; and by them objects and situa
tions are consistently and profitably apprehended and treated.
Some experiences have a certain regularity and lawfulness: these,

1 It is clear then that the following statement of my view is not
correct (Creighton, p. 184), "here as elsewhere the alternative for
Professor Baldwin is between deriving logical principles mechani
cally and finding them existing a priori" (italics his).

2 1 do not accept the term 'mechanism' as applicable to a genetic
movement proper; it denotes only one of the possible naturalistic
interpretations of this movement. My own interpretation, em
bodied in the theory of 'genetic modes,' combats the mechanical
view.

3 The following has reference also to Professor Creighton' s paper
read at Baltimore, to which I listened. It may suggest to him some
revision of that paper, since this discussion, is new.

Il6 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

thus apprehended, come to mean the mechanical. In the case of
other experiences, developing conation shapes the contents towards
personal ends: these, so apprehended, mean the teleological. In the
logical mode, th se two meanings become general ways of assimila
ting events of one type or the other. Each is valid for its purpose,
and each is restricted in its use: one means for experience just the
dominance of external, the other that of internal control.

Now to use either of these as an exclusive or universal mode of
interpretation is to abolish the other in its own province, and so to
falsify our report of the progression of experience in which they
have together arisen. The mechanical would not be mechanical
but for the possession of those characters which show it to be bare
of teleological meaning; it represents knowledge formed under a
control which evidences itself as foreign. The teleological, on the
other hand, would not be teleological but for its character as embody
ing the agent's control exercised in the pursuit of personal ends.
Teleological processes as such are for consciousness not mechanical,
and mechanical are not teleological.

I have contrasted the results of these two modes of process by
using the two expressions ' knowledge through (external) control' —
issuing in sequences which are mechanical in their meaning; and
'(internal) control through knowledge' — issuing in sequences
with which personal interest and conation are identified (Thought
and Things, II, chap. xiv). Unless the teleologists can show,
from the movement of further experience, that there is positive
justification for the step,1 they may not employ as a universal sol
vent the partial meaning which they favor.

2. But even if we allow the category of teleology to apply univer-

1 Actually the progress of experience, both personal and racial,
is away from animistic and anthropomorphic teleological interpre
tations of nature. Science has had gradually to achieve its birth
right, only gradually establishing a conception of natural law which
operates without 'teleological' interference. Just here is, in fact,
in my opinion, the great service rendered by Darwinism to philo
sophical thought : it once for all established a natural law of adapta
tion.

APPENDIX B 117

sally, it too issues in a characteristic dualism from which there is
no logical escape. Ends are attained through the mediation of
ideas or facts. Facts and ideas are not ends: 'what a man hath
why doth he yet hope for?' — it is a further realization, beyond the
idea or fact, that he hopes for. A conscious end is always medi
tated — furthered or hindered — by some fact or idea. To any tele
ology which involves genuine purpose, the dualism of 'fact-idea
and end' — taking the form of ' means and end' or of ' hindrance to
end' — is as stubborn as that of 'thinker and thing' in the domain of
cognition.

To escape this difficulty, the intellectual idealist goes over to a
teleology which does not involve purpose in any concrete or actual
sense, while he still retains vaguely the principle of 'means and ends.'
But what 'means and ends' can mean apart from an agent who
adopts the means (facts or ideas) to attain the ends (results), it is
difficult to see. What is really present is the actual flow of genetic
process, with its great dualisms of knowledge and purpose. If we
take this process for what it is, it discovers itself to experience in
the two modes of organization called teleological or mechanical
according as the situations of actual life present contents of one
sort or the other.1

1 In my discussion of ' genetic series' as such (the theory of ' Gen
etic Modes,' Development and Evolution, chap, xix, described by
Professor Creighton as a sort of invalid compromise), I have pointed
out that such series present both aspects, the quantitative or
mechanical and the qualitative or in the large sense 'worthful:' they
show a form of sequence or conditioning which is not exhausted by
either interpretation taken alone. Professor Creighton is, I think,
in error in saying (p. 182) about this theory that 'the something
new' that it recognizes as arising in a genetic series ' simply comes
into the series as a miracle.' I reply: it is not a miracle except to
one who has already adopted a quantitative or mechanical concep
tion of all natural change. Such a cast-iron quantitative concep
tion apart — why should not nature produce novelties? James and
Bergson, as well as the present writer, have recently protested
against the arid 'energistic' conception of 'cause and effect.' For
my part, I am not willing to prejudice the case by using the terms of
mechanics for such sequences; I have therefore employed the term

Il8 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES

If this actual genetic movement, so apprehended in experience—
the progressive integration of contents, as on occasion both ' factual'
and 'end-fulfilling' for the agent-Ms what Professor Creighton
means hy 'teleology', then I am with him. I prefer that term to
'mechanism,' if one is to use but one term for the entire movement.
But my aim is to go further constructively, and to discover what the
issue is when the movement does not stop with the mediation by
ideas in either of these two ways — with mediation as true for knowl
edge, and as good for purpose — but when it goes on to apprehend the
contents in a further mode of direct contemplation. The movement
then goes beyond the objectification of the contents in judgment of
fact and value ; and reaches a higher hyper-logical immediacy.1 My
present purpose is accomplished, however, in showing how it is
possible to turn the edge of Professor Creighton 's criticism. I
accept both the terms of the supposed contradiction. I hold that
when legitimately employed, mechanism and teleology are
naturalistic or empirical categories, both valid, but both restricted,
in their proper use, and both superseded in a hyper-logical mode of
experience.

'progression' .... Further, I do not admit Professor Creighton's
claim that a genetic series, as I describe it in my theory of ' genetic
modes,' 'exhibits no identity throughout the different stages of the
process.' On the contrary, the varying degrees of identity which
it actually has for consciousness serve as motive to the transforma
tions of the ' sameness' meaning, as traced in my book in great detail,
up to the logical judgment of identity (vol. i, chap, viii, §3, and
chap, ix, §5; vol. ii, chap. x).

1 To the development of this point much of the third volume of
the Genetic Logic is to be devoted. In an article entitled ' Knowledge
and Imagination,' Psychological Review, May, 1908, I have stated in
outline the characters in virtue of which aesthetic experience appears
to discharge this office. In the same volume (Thought and Things,
iii) the genetic processes are also discussed by which experiences
of truth and utility respectively come to be reflected in the 'intuition'
and 'practical reason' of the individual.

Thought and Things, or Genetic Logic:

A Study of the Development and Meaning of Thought.
By JAMES MARK BALDWIN, LL.D., etc.

Lately Professor in Princeton and Johns Hopkins Universities.

Vol. I. Functional Logic, or Genetic Theory of Knowledge

$2.75 net

PROF. J. E. RUSSELL in Journ. oi Philos. — " I record my fullest appreciation of a
notable book, one that cannot [fail to add to the author's already splendid reputa
tion, and one which will enlarge not a little our knowledge in a great field of science."
The time has come for the reconstruction of the entire discipline of
logic. A reconstruction of logic on the basis of a genetic explanation of our actual
knowledge seems to be manifest destiny in the light of Professor Baldwin's present
work."

THE NATION. — ''This is a most earnest, profound, laborious systematic analysis
of cognition, such as cannot fail to be of continual utility to students of psychology.
It appears to be a signal setting forth of science — what the Germans would call an
'epoch-making' book. When one has to build a house, a definite plan is drawn,
in which all the conditions are duly considered — and this plan becomes the focus of
study. Just such a preliminary project it is with which Professor Baldwin has now
enriched the psychology of cognition. The vocabulary of well-considered new terms
is in itself a precious gift to psychological investigation. For with each of these new
terms there goes a valuable new conception. The publication must serve as a
precious landmark in future investigation, in that it lays down for the first time a
definite project of structure of the theory of cognition in great detail."

PROF. BUCHNER, in a re'sume' of "Psychological Progress in 1906." — "The genetic
method has been wielding an influence shaking up the old distinctions; but there has
not been such a traversing of the whole psychological field solely by its intellectual
right and its scientific authority as that made by Baldwin's Thought and Things.
It promises a complete reconstruction of psychology and also of the cognate phil
osophical diciplines of logic and epistemology, leaving the time-honored distinctions
far'behind. The achievement can be interpreted as an age-movement, and be closely
related to the current intellectual need which has been finding widespread satisfac
tion in pragmatism."

PROF. CREIGHTON, in the Philosophical Review. — "Worked out with great thorough
ness of detail and a comprehensive grasp of guiding principles — one cannot fail to
recognize the importance of the problem and the real value of his results. One
must heartily acknowledge the importance of Prof. Baldwin's contribution in a
comparatively new field."

PROF. A. W. MOORE, in the Psychological Bulletin. — " This is the most comprehen
sive attempt in logic yet made in America. The fact that such a program is offered
and the general standpoint and method of treatment are further evidence that phil
osophy in America is rapidly passing from the absorbing, translating, albeit necessary
period of German apprenticeship into a free creative adulthood."

Nature. — "The first installment of what promises to be an important inquiry into
the actual movement of the function of knowledge. Prof. Baldwin's account of the
process by which cognition is built up is so coherent that it is impossible to give
more than a fraction of its substance. But one finds that the writer has always
something true and important to say."

Vol, II. Experimental Logic, or Genetic Theory of Thought

$2.75 net

Edinburgh Scotsman. — "Three volumes are to go to the full making of the valuable
and elaborate treatise upon logic, of which this is the second. It expounds experi
mental logic, explains how the process of thinking goes on, and examines the sanc
tions of logical validity and the dualisms and limitations of thought. The book is
full of matter, and this volume well maintains the promise of its predecessor that the
complete treatise will rank as one of the most important among recent contribu
tions to the literature of philosophy."

Athenceum. — "The time has not yet come to attempt an estimate of the general
worth of this ambitious effort to construct a systematic logic on genetic lines. The
*hird volume is not written. Meanwhile we congratulate Prof. Baldwin — a thinker
of great vigor and ability — on having accomplished another lap in his long course.
It is very interesting to observe how America having served its philosophical appren
ticeship is now devoting its matured powers to every branch of philosophy in turn.
Logic in particular has recently been taken in hand. The present volume belongs
to the same movement. It displays a predominant interest in genesis, and con
siders thinking and thought in live and organic relation to the mental economy as
a whole. On the other hand, it is a direct challenge and counterblast to the logic
emanating from Chicago. But both parties would agree to condemn as obsolete
and barren much that still passes for logic in certain quarters."

PROF. W. H. SHELDON, in the Psychological Bulletin. — "This second volume, while
lacking nothing in organic unity, contains a wealth of topics of which a review can
give no adequate idea. Prof. Baldwin has shed new light upon many old logical
problems and (what is rare enough hi logical treatises) has really contributed to
our knowledge in several respects. These contributions, together with a broad-
mindedness which can combine opposite extremes of theory, are, in our view, the
chief merits of the work. There is no recent book in English which has covered the
field so fully, in so empirical a spirit, yet with such philosophical and logical power
of interpretation. The 'pragmatic' works were constructive, and empirical, yet
certainly, without taking in as many facts or recognizing as many human needs and
interests. The author is able to find a place for the practical, theoretic, esthetic f
social, even 'logistic' motives that enter into human thought to justify each and to
restrain each to its proper limits It is not easy to say which of the author's special
views seem to us most important: on the whole, however, we think the dualism of
content and control is probably the most fertile contribution. We agree that every
treatment of either the logic or the psychology of cognition should proceed along
these lines. Prof. Baldwin has surveyed and mapped a region which should now be
settled by the logician." «

PROF. CREIGHTON, in "Darwin and Logic. — "What seems to me especially signifi
cant in Mr. Baldwin's work is the account of the stages and means through which the
individual mind develops a fully conscious logical experience. It is in part the same
undertaking that Hegel left so incomplete. The progress of biology and psychology
has made it possible for Prof. Baldwin to present a concrete working out of this
problem which is an immense advance on anything that previously existed."

DR. K. SCHALK, in the Rivista di filosofia. — "Every one must join in admiration o f
this [work] which is full of new researches, original thoughts, and serious work,
especially when it is compared with the leanness of most logical treatises. One of
its merits is that it clears up many of the points at issue between Pragmatism and
the old Philosophy."

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